Mating for Life

by Marissa Stapley

  After, she put away the craft supplies and went upstairs to take a nap. She didn’t wake up in time to make dinner. When she went downstairs, disoriented, Tim and the boys were eating pizza at the kitchen table, straight from the box.

  9

  Eastern Cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus)

  During mating season, male Eastern cottontails often fight with each other. The male and female also perform a kind of mating dance: the male chases the female until she stops, faces him, and boxes at him with her front paws. At some point, one of them leaps straight up in the air and the other follows suit. Eastern cottontails are polygamous.

  Ilsa closed her book and ran her right arm over the empty space on the opposite side of the bed. Michael was still in his office but it was getting late. She stood and went into Ani’s room to check on her, where she stood and watched her sleep, then kissed and stroked her daughter’s cheek. She eventually took her hand away and shut the door softly on her way out, then went into Xavier’s room and stood over the crib he still slept in because he had never once tried to climb out of it, wishing she could lean in and kiss his face but knowing she wouldn’t be able to reach, and if she lifted him up, she’d risk waking him.

  Back in her room, she pulled on a black silk chemise. She looked at her reflection in the mirror and pinched her cheeks, hoping for color. You have to keep trying, she told herself. In the kitchen, she got a bottle of red wine and one glass. No. You have to get two glasses. You have to have a glass of wine with him or he’ll wonder why you aren’t. Then she walked back up the stairs. Michael’s office door was closed. She tapped with one fingernail.

  “Come in.” She pushed open the door.

  “Hi, there,” she said. He didn’t look up from his computer screen.

  “Hi.”

  “You okay?”

  Now he looked up. “I’m still dealing with the fallout from the Copenhagen disaster. Now that it’s in the news, we have shareholders to answer to, and it’s not pretty. More cutbacks. I’m just trying to . . .” He shook his head. “Never mind, it won’t interest you.”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “It’s nothing. Complicated.” There. He dismisses me. I’m not a partner. I’m not even a friend. I’m just here.

  “I thought you might need a break.” She held up the bottle and tried to stop herself from building a case against him. You need him, really need him. “I have wine. And . . .” She trailed off, hoping he would notice the lingerie.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have another few hours here at least. Have a glass without me. I really can’t stop.”

  She felt cold. She wished for a robe. She wished not to be holding two glasses and a bottle. And she also wished not to feel as relieved as she did. You need him to do this. You need him to make love to you. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. Sorry.” He was already typing.

  She closed the door behind her, went downstairs, slid the wine back in the rack, poured herself a glass of orange juice, and turned on the television, even though she hated television. She stopped on a show about lottery winners. All of them had destroyed themselves one by one. She sat, depressively mesmerized, as each winner said he or she wished the money had never materialized. She suddenly felt the same way about her own life. She had won the lottery and squandered it without shame.

  She changed the channel and ended up on one of those commercials with the sad music and the crying children, their huge dark eyes pleading with the screen, the flies crawling on their foreheads. When the camera zoomed in on a toddler too weak to brush away the flies that were crawling on her eyes (on her actual eyeballs), Ilsa did what the earnest celebrity was telling her to do and made the call. “Two, please,” she said. “I’ll take two.” But saying this did nothing to assuage her guilt or tamp down her fear of what was about to happen to her. What was happening to her. In fact, it made it worse. She had said, “I’ll take two,” like they were puppies in the window for the taking, pieces of candy, pairs of shoes. “Actually, three,” she amended, but this didn’t help, either, despite how pleased the phone attendant was with her.

  “You’re a wonderful person,” the attendant said.

  “I’m not. Really. I’m not.”

  • • •

  After returning home from the cottage early, Ilsa had tried to resist Lincoln. As frustrated as her conversation at the cottage with Liane had made her, it had also forced her to think about what she was doing. And perhaps she had also thought that the rift between her and Liane, something so foreign to her, so sad, so lonely, would somehow heal if she stopped what she was doing, if she heeded her younger sister’s cautionary words. Thus she was able to ignore the first two texts he sent her, saying things to herself like, No. I’m not going to do this. Yes, I’m bored in my marriage. Worse than bored: suffocated. Yes, most of the time I feel like Michael doesn’t see me. And yes, part of the time I feel like I don’t even want him to, would rather fly under his radar. But what I need to do is make him see me. I need to try to be a better wife. A better person. A better everything. I can’t just throw this all away. I made a commitment. And there are the children to think about.

  One afternoon, though, she took the train into the city to meet a friend. On the subway, a man sat across from her, a construction worker, dirty boots, paint-spattered hands, a cooler at his feet. He was handsome, young. He watched her appraisingly. Every time she looked up from her book their eyes met and her cheeks felt hot and she felt hot and she thought to herself, What if I wrote him a note on one of the pages of my book and handed it to him. A note that said, Do you want to fuck me? Get off the train at the next stop. The depravity of the thought surprised and slightly disgusted her, but she was also captivated by the fantasy. She held the man’s gaze for a long time as her stop approached. The train slowed and she got off and didn’t look back.

  A week later, at a gallery opening Ilsa forced herself to go to so she could somehow begin to feel part of the art world again, Lincoln was there, and this made her believe it was fate. She had walked slowly around the room, looking at the paintings, coming closer and closer to him. Finally, he had come to stand beside her in front of a canvas. “Are you ignoring me, Ilsa?” he had asked. She had kept her eyes on the artwork. “No,” she had replied. “Just delaying the inevitable.” They had shared a taxi from the city to Rye, but, to her surprise, he had not touched her in the taxi, during a ride that took nearly forty minutes. Then: “Stop the taxi at the end of Elm,” he had instructed. This was a few blocks away from her house.

  Outside of the taxi, he had taken her hand, and they had walked. Soon they were back where he had kissed her the first time. It was so dark she couldn’t see.

  This is wrong. He had lifted her skirt, pulled down her panties, moved closer: How did this happen so fast? She had felt as though she were moving through water, like a person in a dream who wanted to stop something but couldn’t because the air somehow weighed a thousand pounds. “No, we can’t do this. Not here, not now,” she had finally said.

  “But we will,” he had said. And then he had walked away and left her there, alone in the dark.

  She had become instantly disoriented. She couldn’t see. How dare he? How dare he? Asshole. Cad. Lincoln fucking Porter.

  Eventually she had straightened her skirt and ventured out from between the houses. A rustling in the dry brush made her stop. Panic made her chest feel constricted. But it was just a rabbit. It jumped out of the darkness and she tried not to scream, tried to see the humor as it hopped away, its tail bright white in the pitch-black.

  He was standing in the shadows, waiting. “It was just a rabbit,” he said. “Were you scared?”

  She had brushed past him and walked quickly, her heels sinking into the grass until she reached the sidewalk again.

  “Ilsa! Wait!”

  “No! This was a mistake. I didn’t know you were so—Clear
ly, I thought you were someone else.”

  He had caught up to her in two strides.

  “I’m sorry. I was just playing a game with you.”

  “I don’t play games.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He had grabbed her arm and pulled her to him, kissing her roughly. She had kissed him back for a moment but then pulled away and looked up at him and, to her shock, had sobbed aloud, a harsh, choking sound. His expression had changed immediately.

  “Ilsa—”

  “You’re scaring me,” she had said. “Please, just let me go. I need to get home.”

  He hadn’t let go of her but his hold on her had softened. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you, gorgeous Ilsa. Beautiful girl.” And he had stroked her hair, pushing her bangs up and away from her eyes, then kissed her once, very gently. “I thought . . . forgive me, I thought this was what you wanted. You gave me the impression that you wanted to be . . .” He shook his head. “I’ll walk you home.”

  Swiftly, Ilsa became indignant. “I gave you the impression that what? That I had just read one of those soft-core S&M novels all the housewives in this neighborhood are getting horny about and decided I wanted someone to play rough with me, too?”

  He smiled and shook his head. “Not you. You don’t read those books, do you?”

  “Of course not!”

  They had continued to walk. She had known with doomed certainty that Lincoln clearly wasn’t in the same situation or place as her, wasn’t struggling with the morality of this, wasn’t finding this difficult to do at all, was in fact trying to play games with her. She didn’t know him well and yet she felt she did, felt she could see the way he moved through life like a man at a buffet, choosing among the items that were presented to him, sometimes when he wasn’t even hungry. And there she was. The girl on the half shell. It would be a shame to waste her when she was clearly so ready.

  She had allowed another gentle kiss a few houses from hers, and then he had walked away and she had quietly unlocked the door and gone inside and held in another sob and thought, That’s it. I’ll never see him again, at least not intentionally.

  • • •

  Liane had called her, later in the summer, and Ilsa had said, “I’m sorry,” even before Liane could say hello. “I don’t know why I didn’t phone you,” Ilsa had continued. “Nothing like this has happened to us before, and I felt terrible and stupid and I never picked up the phone because I didn’t know what I would say.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left the cottage like that, and I should have called, too—but here’s the thing. I sort of needed to be on my own. I needed to make some decisions without asking for help. I’ve never done that before, so . . .” Liane cleared her throat. “I left Adam,” she said, and Ilsa felt guilty for feeling so relieved, and also happy that she had been right about him being wrong for Liane.

  “Oh, Li. Are you doing okay?”

  “I think so. It was a fairly clean break. Very ordered. Very Adam. I’m staying with a friend for now, but I’ve lined up my own place, and I’m really—yes, I am happy about this. I made the right decision.” Ilsa thought that Liane sounded partly like she was trying to convince herself and partly like she was genuinely happy. She decided being partly happy was half the battle and that she didn’t need to worry about her. Then Liane had said, “How are things with Michael?” and Ilsa had said, “Fine. A lot better.” And Ilsa had decided that she would make this statement be true. I can and I will forget all about Lincoln. And about the desperate housewife cliché I’m becoming. About how I’m like my father in my appetites, how I fantasize about having sex with random people on subways.

  So she gave her husband massages when he came in late from work. She left notes for him, asked him to dinner. (He couldn’t, both times she asked.) One night, she cooked his favorite, coq au vin, which he picked at before saying he needed to go upstairs and sort something out, that she shouldn’t wait up for him, that he was sorry, he just wasn’t hungry. She had been wearing a new matching lace bra-and-panties set under her dress. Of course, he had no way of knowing this, but she still felt resentful. Another strike. If he really loved me, the way I need to be loved, he would have known.

  After he had gone upstairs, she had dumped the food in the garbage, even though she had known it was petty and wasteful to do so, even though there was a famine in the Horn of Africa and so many people didn’t have anything to eat. And then she had gone to her handbag and taken out her cell phone. She had stared down at it.

  But she had been unable to bring herself to send Lincoln a text message. In truth, she despised text messages. Liane had once said it was probably because she was an artist and excessively tactile. Even Michael, at first, had understood this, had sometimes sent her handwritten letters from New York instead of emails, when she was still living in Toronto. It was the care he took in his pursuit of her—Michael got what he wanted, or at least back then he did—that had caused her, however temporarily, to actually fall in love with him instead of just wanting to fall in love with him, instead of just wishing she wasn’t in love with someone else. Sometimes these letters came with plane tickets enclosed, or letters attached to presents that were both beautiful and thoughtful. (Her favorite, an armful of white-gold and aquamarine bangle bracelets; another time, a weighty art book she had casually mentioned wanting to read, with a beautiful, hand-painted bookmark inside.) If he had not done these things, she probably never would have been able to convince herself that marrying him was a good idea.

  This had been a different Michael, though. A happy, confident Michael. It was incredible to Ilsa how much of her husband’s being was tied to his company. She had at first kept telling herself it was normal: Wasn’t she tied to her art, wasn’t it destroying her slowly inside that she couldn’t paint? But somehow she saw what Michael was going through as different. While he fought desperately to improve his company, he allowed their relationship to starve and himself to decline from the stress. She didn’t respect this. Once she had said to him, “Is this really worth it? We could live on less.” And he had looked at her over the rim of his glasses, laughed bitterly, and said, “Perhaps we could, but my ex-wife couldn’t, and my children couldn’t.” She felt sorry for him then. But this didn’t temper her resentment.

  • • •

  Two days after she dumped out the coq au vin, when she arrived at her studio, shoulders already beginning to slump dejectedly in preparation for another fruitless morning, there had been a postcard leaning against the door. On the front was an image of Gauguin’s Nevermore (O Tahiti), and on the back, Lincoln had written: Ilsa Bissette, I’m longing to kiss you again. Where have you gone?—L.

  Bold of him, she thought. How did he know her husband didn’t accompany her to her studio, that her neighbors weren’t nosy, that this wasn’t an invitation to be found out?

  She had picked up the postcard and brought it inside, then stood looking alternately at it and at the morning sunlight streaming through the window and the dust motes dancing in the air. Then she had sat down and started a painting that was not terrible, that was not heavy with dark purple—like the color Lincoln had seen on her wrist the day they had met, part of a palette of dark, depressing colors she had been working with, even though she hated them—but was instead light and alluring.

  Her elation had not lasted. She didn’t know how to respond to his postcard. She still couldn’t bring herself to send a text message, wasn’t sure if she should call, and couldn’t very well walk over to his house. Yet for a week the postcard lit the edges of her life with the something that had been missing.

  Until Michael casually asked her if she had any shows coming up, any paintings to sell, and she felt the light go out. “No,” she had answered, wishing she could offer an explanation.

  “I’m wondering if it makes sense for you to have the studio anymore,” he had said, and she had hate
d him in that moment even as she knew it was true. “Perhaps we could just set up the spare bedroom as a home studio? Or maybe the basement?” The basement. The basement. Didn’t he know she needed light? And yet, she knew he had a point. Did it make sense to pay a monthly rental on a room where she went to do absolutely nothing? No, it didn’t. But she needed the space, desperately, had needed it always and even more so after having children, whom she loved but also felt crowded by at times. It was hard, when she was at home, not to think of them and what they were doing or what they would be doing when they returned, or what she had said to them last. She needed a place to go that was only hers, so that she could otherwise be what they needed her to be. She felt angry at Michael for suggesting that this be taken away, and angry with herself for not being able to produce enough to sustain it. “You’re the one who said once we could try to live on less,” he said later, in response to her sulking. When she left for her studio, she had slammed the door, hard. Ani and Xavier were at the park with Sylvie, or she wouldn’t have done it.

  At her studio, she cut out a small, postcard-sized piece of stiff paper, and she did something daring, something she used to do when she and Michael were dating—and not just Michael, but also Eric, her first husband. It seemed even more daring now. So much was at risk.

  This painting was the curve of her waist, the rise of her hips, and the top of her thigh. She stopped there. She let the painting dry for a day, then wrote on the back of the makeshift postcard: Next time, knock. I’m at my studio most days, at least until three.

  She thought about traveling into the city, all the way to his studio, but knew that would be a mistake. He wasn’t like her, virtually unknown. She couldn’t just walk in and prop a suggestive postcard against his door. He probably had an assistant who would intervene, toss this piece of perceived fan mail in the trash. So she looked up the name and address of his studio on the Internet and put the painting in an envelope and mailed it before she could change her mind. She felt sick with anticipation.