by Wendy Walker
“I don’t have to think out here’not about clients, or bills, or the girls’ every spat with their friends, the house falling part, or the fact that I fail you every day by leaving cereal boxes on the counter or wet towels on the floor.” He stopped for a moment, and looked away.
“I just don’t want to think anymore.”
TWENTY-THREE
THE DIAGNOSIS
As SHE ALWAYS DID, Yvonne Welsh made herself at home in the Pas-setis’ kitchen. With her daughter’s house filled to the brim with little humans, toys, food, and general clutter, she had accepted the invitation years ago to stay next door when she came into town. Though it was no larger in square footage, Marie kept a tight ship in her house and was, from what Yvonne could see, an exceptionally organized individual. From bathroom to bedroom to den, only essentials filled the space. One couch, one matching chair in the TV room, a modest table and china cabinet in the dining area, toys carefully shelved in each of the girls’ bedrooms’there was room to breathe here. And what was lacking in the sparse, minimalist decor was more than made up for by the family photographs that were displayed throughout, telling the story of their lives to all who entered.
Standing at the counter, waiting for the coffee to finish brewing, Yvonne listened to the young woman vent.
“And then he just drove off,” she continued, throwing her hands in the air to emphasize her dismay at the morning’s events. “Can you believe it? I’m in shock’shock!”
Yvonne sighed and shook her head. Though she had known for some time that it was the truest of truisms, the thought came to her yet again. Youth is wasted on the young.
Pouring the coffee that was now ready, Yvonne handed a cup to Marie .and waited for her to settle down.
“You girls,” she said, a note of pity in her voice. “What is it with you girls and this idea of equality between the sexes? You make things so complicated.”
Marie bit her tongue as they moved the conversation to the kitchen table.
“Things are different today, Yvonne. Women are more than domestic servants. Thank God.”
Yvonne smiled. “Are they? Isn’t that what you’ve been complaining about for the past twenty minutes?”
She had a point, Marie supposed. Since returning from that godforsaken country club, Marie had done nothing but go on about the inequities in the house’how Anthony conveniently turned a blind eye to chores waiting to be done, or gave sub-par performances any time he was left to watch the girls’a transparent ploy to avoid the assignment in the future. Then there was the way he’d ask for a beer and expect its quick delivery anytime he dusted off the weed whacker. Not to mention that devil sport of his.
“It’s not right. If I can do his job, why can’t he do mine?”
“Because he’s a man,” Yvonne said emphatically.
Marie thought about that, and wondered how many times she’d heard it before. My husband just can’t deal with the children. It’s not in him. My husband is just no good at the shopping. He always comes home with bags full of junk food. Wasn’t it convenient that these claims of incompetence were limited to household duties? Doing laundry was not rocket science. And no one knew how to settle a baby’until they’d had to figure it out or lose their mind.
“Oh, Marie … It’s so much easier if you just accept that men are different from women.” It was self-evident to Yvonne, who’d enjoyed more than her rightful share of the creatures and, by a fair accounting, believed to know them well.
Marie shook her head, biting down on what was left of her thumbnail.
“You’ll never change that. And besides, wouldn’t that be awfully bor-ing?”
For a moment Marie pictured the version of Anthony her demands implied. Coming home from work, hanging up his keys on the right hook. Helping with dinner, engaging in the conversation as they ate. Clearing dishes, wiping the table. His small but growing gut hanging out of his pants as he got down on all fours with a wet sponge to clear the food from the floor. Then sorting whites from colors, pre-spotting stains on Olivia’s sun dresses. The image was almost absurd, and it made her wonder. Is that what would bring it back’the desire to climb into bed at night and wrap her arms around him when he was still awake? The feeling had disappeared so slowly, with such subtlety over the years, it was impossible to impart a cause with any degree of certainty.
“Enough about golf,” Marie said, shaking off the confusion. “How is Love? Any progress with a diagnosis?”
Yvonne held her palms to the sky with no attempt to hide her irritation at Bill and the medical community as a whole. She had given it a week, watching her daughter struggle in pain, watching the kids worry’Henry in particular. Baby Will wasn’t taking his bottle, and Love made herself worse every time she nursed him. She had deferred to Bill because he was the husband, the doctor, and because in her older age she had accepted that traditional medicine wasn’t completely irrational. Still, in her heart of hearts she believed in a more holistic, spiritual approach to healing, and her conviction that they were on the wrong path was growing by the minute.
“They drew some blood and tested for Lyme disease. Now they want to rule out lupus, of all things. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it, if you ask me. Not that anyone would’God forbid.”
Marie patted Yvonne on the shoulder and got up from the table, coffee in hand. “Come on, let’s look it up.”
They went to the small study off the living room where Marie kept her laptop. Looking things up on the Internet was Marie’s cure for everything perplexing, though it rarely made her feel any better. Too much information could be a very bad thing. After seven years of investigating the various ailments of her daughters, she was now convinced that the word tumor could be found on every Web site ever created.
“What should we call it?”
Yvonne shrugged, taking a seat on the small sofa behind Marie’s desk. “Muscle pain?”
Marie repeated the words as she typed. “How about muscle pain symptom disease.”
She scrolled the first page of search results then chose one at random. “There’sixty-two diseases with muscle pain symptoms.”
“Sixty-two?!” Yvonne was beginning to feel overwhelmed.
Marie scrolled down to the “T” section to amuse herself. Sure enough, tumor was disease number 47.
“Let’s start from the top. Acute bacterial prostatitis, African sleeping sickness, anthrax …”
“Stop!” Yvonne couldn’t listen to sixty-two ways her daughter might be ill. “Just read the ones that might be possible. I doubt she has African sleeping sickness.”
“OK.” Marie read the list to herself. “Here’s one’chronic fatigue syndrome.”
“Can they test for it?”
Marie clicked on the link, then shook her head. “Not really. They just rule out everything else.”
“Great’what others?”
Going back to the list, Marie continued to read. Then she stopped suddenly and sighed.
“What?” Yvonne asked, visibly alarmed.
Marie paused, then read the illness. “Depression.”
“Depression? Is my daughter depressed?”
Marie swiveled her chair to face Yvonne. She could see on the woman’s face that they both knew the answer.
“What’s been going on?” Yvonne asked, fishing for information.
Marie sensed something in her tone’a lack of genuine ignorance. Playing hide and seek was her job, after all. But after years of living in a town of make-believe, Yvonne was equally skilled at playing it close to the vest.
“I thought you might know. It’s been going on for a few weeks.”
“And you didn’t ask her what was wrong?”
“Of course. She said she was tired. Will gives her a hard time.”
“Huh.”
The two women were quiet for a moment, calculating. Then Yvonne got up, left the room, and returned moments later with a folded piece of paper.
“Here,” she said, handing it to Marie.
Marie unfolded the paper, which was worn from handling. “A letter?”
Yvonne nodded. “From Love’s father.”
Marie gave the woman a look of surprise, then read it to herself.
“Christ!” she said.
“I know.”
The letter, curt and brief, was an announcement’a warning, really’ from Alexander Rice that a new work was about to be released. It was an autobiography, a self-proclaimed “coming clean” about his life. And in his narcissistic effort to be understood’maybe even embraced’by the world at large, Yvonne knew he hadn’t given one moment’s pause to consider the impact it would have on his daughter. What he would write, and how much he would betray, was the only question that remained in her mind’and possibly in Love’s as well.
“No wonder she’s a mess. They haven’t spoken for years, and now his face will be everywhere.”
That’s just for starters, Yvonne thought. No one in this little Hunting Ridge life knew the truth about Love’s past, the night that stole her destiny out from under her. No one had to know. But locking it away had only produced a fierce appetite for everything destructive in Love. Drugs, alcohol, men. The desire to be dead. Yvonne wondered how much Love allowed herself to remember now’or if she had found a safe place to keep it all, some kind of internal steel vault.
“She hasn’t said anything about it?”
Marie shook her head. “No’and there’s been nothing about it in the papers.”
Yvonne sighed, and for the first time since Marie had known her, she looked utterly defeated. “Do you think he sent her a letter, too?”
Marie handed Rice’s letter back to Yvonne. “I have no idea. She hasn’t mentioned it if he did.”
“No, she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t tell a living soul.” Yvonne looked at the folded paper in her hand. “He sent her one. That has to be what’s wrong with her.”
“It’s just a book. Maybe it won’t even do well.”
Marie had no idea how little that would matter.
Yvonne pounded her fist into her leg, then got up to pace. “I could kill that man.”
She’d come to town thinking her daughter had a physical injury, one that would heal. She would help with the children, then be on her way. Now, she was sure of only one thing.
“We need a copy,” she announced.
“I thought it wasn’t coming out until July?”
“No,” Yvonne said. “We need it now’before it comes out. There must be some galleys floating around.”
Marie’s eyes lit up. She wasn’t convinced that Love’s illness was some psychosomatic side effect of depression. Love was tough, and practical. If anything, the anxiety over her father’s book had probably driven her to overextend herself. Love was telling everyone it was just a pulled muscle, and Marie wanted to believe her. But if getting a copy of her father’s book would put her mind at ease, maybe even give her the rest she so desperately needed, then Marie was determined to help.
She picked up the phone.
“I know exactly who to call.”
TWENTY-FOUR
ROOM 221
IN ROOM 221, JANIE Kirk felt the hands dig deeper into her flesh, pulling her hips down, then up again. She opened her eyes and took in the room, the cheap, tasteless decor, the bright light of midday. It was a Rosewood Inn, a generic hotel in downtown Cliffton’something between sleazy roadside and luxurious Four Seasons’and it fit the mood to a tee. They were in a hurry. She had to pick up the kids, he had to get back to the office. There was no time to talk, no time for a sultry dance undressing each other. They were here for one reason. To fuck. Straddled over him, watching him smile with hedonistic delight at her abandon, she said the word over and over’first in her head, then fully out loud. Fuck … fuck … fuck … FUCK!!!!
They had waited three days, three tedious days, before finding the time to meet. Their last encounter and the promise of the next one had left a residue’an unsettled nervousness in her gut that seemed to be consuming her from the inside. It was familiar. She’d felt it the first time she’d wanted a man’the “butterflies” that moved inside her every time she was near him. Then again when she fell in crazy, insane love at first sight at the age of nineteen. It had kept her from eating, sleeping’made her want to escape from her own body. In one month, she’d lost fifteen pounds and taken up smoking. At night, she would drink it away, partying with her girlfriends, scouring the campus bars in search of him.
It was here again, that lust heroin that thrust its victim into a state of intolerable withdrawal. Everywhere she went, she saw men. And they saw her. The last one sent her over the edge’the young guy at the gas station in Cliffton where she’d gone to buy cigarettes. Standing there, searching for the brand she had given up nearly twenty years before, she found herself watching him’the strong muscles bulging from beneath his shirt, his fit stomach and scruffy, masculine face. Beyond her control, her thoughts raced to a vision that made her close her eyes for fear that he would see it, that it might come to be’his powerful hands, stained with oil right down to the fingernails, digging into her back as she lay beneath him, right there on the counter where he was placing the cigarettes and punching numbers into the register. She imagined her clean, manicured fingers unbuckling his jeans, then reaching inside.
Every man not her husband seemed to provoke the untenable longing that had grown roots within her. She’d driven fast, as if somehow she might outrun it, smoking, singing at the top of her lungs.
What had she awakened? For days now, she’d felt alone at her core, isolated from the friends she couldn’t possibly tell. Her entire world had become some faraway place, though she was still drifting within it in like a phantom. Wanting to feel something again’something for another person’had driven her to act, only now she felt too much to dwell in this benign existence of small talk and shopping and gourmet salads. She missed the mild pleasure of those things. She missed the small moments of joy with her children that were now overshadowed by desire. And so, she had secured the room, turned up the heat, and turned down the bed.
Then came the knock at the door. Without a word, he’d entered and thrown a gym bag on the floor.
“Are you ready to play?” he’d said, looking first at her, then to the bag.
A shock had run through her, the boring housewife who spent most of her life in a station wagon, and the rest in the kitchen.
“Bring it on.” She’d said it like an actress in a low budget porn film, and the dirty tone of her own words nearly brought on the climax. He’d waited to touch her, instead removing his suit pants and boxer shorts. Following his lead, she’d done the same, tossing her black stretch pants on top of his shoes.
“Get on the bed.” The last words were spoken. Still partially clothed in her spandex shirt and gym socks, Janie had watched him remove the toys from the bag’the same toys that were now sprawled out around her as she lay there, totally spent from the activities that had just taken place.
“Fuck,”she said once more, reaching for a cigarette on the side table.
Staring at the ceiling as she lit up, he folded his arms behind his head. “I’ll bet you don’t get that at home.”
No, she thought. Not even close. Their skin had hardly touched. The kissing was deep and purposeful, and entirely lacking in meaning. He hadn’t placed as much as a finger on her breasts’his focus being elsewhere, his hands too busy operating the heavy machinery. There was nothing like this in Daniel’s playbook, and she imagined it was exactly this sort of an aberration that was needed after two decades of fucking the same way.
She took a long drag off the cigarette, then watched with childish glee as the smoke billowed past the NO SMOKING sign over the bed. “I could never do this with Daniel.”
He looked at her now, his face genuinely intrigued. “Daniel’s a stiff, isn’t he? I always knew that about him.”
But Janie shook her head. “Not really. He reads porn’and not the ones with the articles.”
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“Janie, all men read porn.”
Laughing at her as though she were a naive child, he pulled the cigarette from between her fingers and stole a drag. “Look, I hope this won’t offend you, but the truth of the matter is, men like tits, pussies, and fucking. End of story.”
Janie gave a sarcastic laugh.
“Lovely.”
“Are you offended?” No.
“I just thought, you know, since we don’t have to do the whole married couple dance, I could say what I want.”
“It’s OK.”
Janie was smoking, and thinking, and her silence had him unnerved.
“I could be wrong. Maybe it’s not all men. Maybe Daniel is more like that man we all pretend to be when we look for a wife.”
“If you have to pretend, then why do you even bother with marriage?”
“Huh,” was his answer. But he was only stumped for a moment. “I guess … children. Family. The same reasons women look for husbands.”
“I think most women look for love, even when they’re looking to get married.”
“Shit,” he said as he shrugged. “Sorry.”
Now Janie was laughing hard and out loud. She liked that he wasn’t bullshitting her. It was refreshing. And the simplicity of his answers had brought a wave of clarity.
“Now I’ve done it, haven’t I? I’ve made you too mad to fuck me again,” he said, rolling closer to her. She felt him reach over her, then heard a soft electronic buzzing.
She dropped the cigarette in a glass of water. She felt his mouth on the nape of her neck and moaned softly. They had only a few minutes more to put life on hold, and she would savor each second. There was nothing inside her now but her own desire, and it was not the same desire that had drawn her to Daniel so many years ago. The initial attraction, then the slow peeling back of layers until they were completely exposed and vulnerable to one another. Each night in Daniel’s bed had been a step closer to the very thing that was now missing in their marriage’a relationship. There was no chance of that here.
