“Was he . . . indiscreet?” Liam asked. His voice was casual. “Did you know?”
I shook my head. “Not really. And she knew, so I don’t know how much discretion was involved. But I never ran into him on State Street with a redhead in a garter belt, if that’s what you mean. Maybe he just sneaked over to some girl’s house every Thursday.”
There was a long silence.
“Do you want me to stop coming over?” he asked.
Though I’d goaded him into asking, actually hearing the suggestion—in a voice that was horribly calm—frightened me.
“Of course not,” I backtracked. “I’m just worried.” I stretched out next to him, hooking a leg over his.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he said finally. “I hope it works out. I do think you have to cut him some slack.”
“I am,” I said. He craned his neck to look at me where my head was tucked beneath his chin, and I shook my head and went on. “Why do you just assume you know my reaction to it? Anyway, what does it matter what I think? If he wants to sleep with someone, that’s none of my business. Maybe he’s crazy about her.”
I waited for him to respond. My head was resting on his chest, rising and falling as he breathed. He smelled of lime-scented deodorant and the slightly ferrous scent of warm skin. Go ahead, I thought, afraid to look at him, give me all the good reasons. But he didn’t enumerate my sexy virtues, my mistress’s tactics that drew him disastrously back to me every time.
“Or,” I said, “maybe he thinks he gets a free pass on that particular vow.”
Liam looked me over, forced a laugh, and said, “You sound like Rush Limbaugh.”
“Well, you sound like some boys-will-be-boys . . .excuser.”
“ ‘Excuser’?”
“Apologist.” Goddamn it. You could never just forget a word with an English professor. “You know what I mean.”
If I were watching from above, I realized, I’d have seen my leg hooked hopefully around his knees as though I might go in for a tackle—I wore unsexy clothes, but I’d shaved, moisturized, and put on matching underwear—and a hand clutching him around the ribs. Liam stirred, sitting up, and looked around for his clothes. They were on the floor by the bedroom door.
“Don’t go away angry,” I said.
He reached for his water glass and drank, giving me a look over the glass. “Oh good,” he said, “the passive-aggressive part of the encounter.”
“I’m not passive-aggressive. I’m trying to be honest.”
“Fine. You’re honest,” Liam said. He glanced at his watch. “And I’m out of time.”
“Oh yes,” I said. “The glancing-at-the-watch portion of the afternoon.”
He had put on his jeans and now he stopped, the zipper still undone and the flaps hanging down over his hip bones. His boxer shorts were bunched up above the waistband.
He said, “Why are we doing this now? How come we never have a good time anymore without you poisoning the water?”
“I don’t,” I said, startled. I’d forgotten that he noticed if I was being snippy. I was too busy thinking about how I felt.
He put his shirt on and looked me in the eye as he buttoned it.
“Yes, you do,” he said. “In the past couple weeks I notice you chipping away every time I come over.”
“Please,” I said. “I let a little reality creep in and you’re all aflutter.”
“Right. Last week I was fifteen minutes late and you practically started calling me names.”
I sighed and stared at the ceiling. “Everything was fine till you started telling me your vacation plans.”
“I thought you’d want to know I’d be out of town. Would you prefer I just disappear for two weeks?”
I let that float out there and didn’t answer. I just wanted to punish him a little right then. I would have preferred to be dressed at that moment, but I stayed where I was, my legs crossed at the ankles. “You know, there’s something very disconcerting about a guy who can compartmentalize like you can.”
“Compartmentalize,” he repeated flatly.
“Yup.” I set down my glass and climbed up on my knees. He was sitting on the edge of the bed tying his shoes, and he stopped and stared at the laces. For a second, out of the habit of being near him, I wanted to touch his hair, which had grown down over his collar in the months that I had known him. It had gotten less curly as it grew, rumpled into waves.
“It’s not even all that tough on you to have this little double life, is it?” I asked.
“Believe me,” he said, “it’s getting tougher.”
“I’LL TELL YOU THIS,” Jill informed me, “I think I’m going to really plow through school this year. I mean it. I’m sick of all this part-time crap. I’m sick of Cs. I’m just going to do it.”
She nodded to herself and sipped her coffee, handing it back to me to hold as she drove. Jill had been hit with enthusiasm a few days before, actually going out and buying new notebooks, which she labeled with her course titles, as though we were in grade school. I accompanied her to the bookstore to get our textbooks but couldn’t begin to match her enthusiasm as I looked for Creating Demand: Marketing in the Twenty-first Century.
“I think we should make a pact,” she went on. She turned into the campus parking ramp and got her ticket, shoving it into the visor. “Because it’s very easy for us to influence each other. All one of us has to do is open a beer and the whole studying atmosphere is blown.”
“By ‘one of us,’ you clearly mean ‘me.’ ”
“Frequently, yes. But I’m guilty too.” We swung around a corner to the lower level of the ramp, which had plenty of open spaces. Jill chuckled evilly. “Don’t ever tell anyone about the lower level,” she reminded me. “People never think to try it first.
“Anyway,” she said. We got out of the car and took our bags from the backseat. “You have a good thing with Kate; she’ll work with you on your classes and all. Have you figured out your new schedule yet?”
“Yeah. It’ll be like five days a week,” I said. Jill stopped and looked at me. I looked away and took a drink of her coffee.
“How will you keep up?” She took her coffee back from me. “I thought she was hiring a new caregiver.”
“She did, but she’s still being trained. And I trimmed my course load a little. Just stuff I didn’t really want anyway.” I started walking again, hoping to get her moving. As we went up the stairs and out toward library mall Jill was quiet and so was I, hoping to avoid a lecture. No one had asked me to drop the courses. I just thought it was the simplest way to handle it until the caregiver situation was settled.
“Well,” Jill said doubtfully, “if you think so.”
I wasn’t sure I did think so, but I’d gone ahead and done it. At the time it felt like I had to. Hillary’s schedule was already crazy, and I couldn’t ask Kate to rely on the new girl full-time. I was stuck with it now, for the semester at least, and I hadn’t regretted it till I saw Jill happily ticking off her course requirements and dropping in to the student employment office.
At least I had been prepared for her to be taken aback. My mother had been none too pleased either, but Kate paid me enough that my parents lacked a bargaining chip. They paid for my tuition, and all I had done was reduce their bill. “This woman is asking an awful lot of you,” my mother had sniffed. “This is why people unionized, Becky.”
“She’s not asking me anything,” I told her. “If you met her you’d see why I like working for her. Why don’t you come to town sometime? We could have dinner.”
“It’s just a bit much for a part-time job that’s not a career,” she went on, ignoring the invitation.
“Well, I don’t even know what I’m doing in half my classes. And I don’t give a damn about marketing in the twenty-first century.”
“Is that all this is about? So change your major!” she cried, as though I had remarked, You know, with this plastic over my face it’s really hard to breathe.
/> Jill and I parted at the bottom of Bascom Hill, and I headed to my first class, heaving a sigh as I walked past the English building. The students looked even younger than usual this year. You could spot a freshman at twenty yards. I always pitied them at the beginning of the fall semester, when they emerged from the dorms sheathed in new sunglasses and pristine scarlet UW jackets though it was still too warm to wear them, panting up Bascom Hill and then facing the tougher teachers like Liam through a layer of sweat. He liked to be a hard-ass at the beginning of the semester, just to set the tone. Once he’d told me he modeled the act after a Shakespeare professor from ten years ago, from whom he’d been grateful just for a B minus. Liam was probably in a classroom right now, amusing himself by writing phrases like “fin de siècle weltschmerz” on the board because it intrigued the bright students and put a good scare into the lazy ones. Then he’d warn his students that if they sold back their Norton Anthology of English Poetry at the end of the semester, they’d be simpletons, one and all.
seven
I WAS NOT A fan of the new caregiver. She was a friend of Hillary’s, which was the tiniest of black marks in my book. I had wanted to like Hillary at first, but she was almost perfectly expressionless. Until I realized in what short supply good caregivers were, I had wondered what happened to Kate’s policy of hiring people she liked. When I worked with Hillary the first few times I had kept up a running patter of jokes and chitchat, much of which she simply ignored. Occasionally she gave me a mirthless smile.
The friend Kate had hired, Simone, was not a nursing student but a part-time waitress who spent her free time sculpting. She was tiny and chirpy, with a fey habit of tilting her head when she gazed at Kate. We, Kate and I, were baffled at the prospect of a friendship between Hillary and Simone, and speculated that Simone’s general sprightliness perked up Hillary a bit. “Like fairy dust,” said Kate. “Like a horsefly,” I remarked, and Kate laughed in spite of herself before composing herself. She didn’t like to say anything about the other caregivers.
When I was called upon to train Simone she frequently took out the band that held her ponytail and then stood there, thoughtfully braiding her dark hair, while Kate and I spoke to her. She had wanted to try caregiving because it was a new experience, she said, and she was always trying to “broaden.”
With Kate she vacillated between overfamiliar and standoffish. When we went shopping during her training and paused to look at a sweater, she stood behind Kate’s chair and fondled the tips of her hair, but in the bathroom she often tried to handle Kate with one hand and had come close to dropping her.
When we left Kate on the toilet for a moment Simone and I stood in the kitchen and stared at each other. “You really need to be more careful,” I told her finally. “Two hands. A real grip. That bathroom floor isn’t cotton balls.”
She watched me for a moment, then gave a tinkling laugh. “I know! I’m such a klutz. Which is weird because in my art my hands are very sensitive.” She held up her fingertips to demonstrate.
She was supposed to take five shifts a week, as Hillary and I did. Every time I arrived at the end of Simone’s shifts, however, Kate seemed frazzled and irritable, and Simone oblivious. She was supposed to order the nutrition shakes, and I watched the supply dwindle for two weeks before I finally gave in and called myself. Hillary seemed unaware of her friend’s incompetence, and rather than bring it up I asked Simone if I could have a couple of her shifts. I said I needed the money. It was just simpler for me not to worry, and though I tried to think of duties to foist off on her, I didn’t trust her with many of them. With Ted the wheelchair distributor, for instance, she’d be completely useless. She’d let him lift Kate clumsily and peremptorily without getting in his way, never jabbing even one accidental heel onto his instep.
“YOU’RE OUT OF GROCERIES,” I told Kate. “I can get you some things if you need them.” I poured nutrition shake into her tube and held the funnel up, waiting. I reached back to the counter and took a sip of my coffee. I had to leave for class in a minute, but I had come over early to get her up and eating. Simone, who was supposed to be there, had had some sort of yoga emergency. She’d called me at seven, sounding freakishly alert for someone who wouldn’t touch caffeine.
Kate looked up at me and nodded, raising her brows briefly to let me know to go on.
“Oh, I just thought you might want something,” I said. “Just something to cook and keep around.”
“You don’t have to cook so much,” said Kate.
“It’s okay, I like to,” I told her.
“Bec,” she said. “Evan isn’t here to eat anymore. Who’s eating all these beautiful meals?”
I said nothing, embarrassed. I was so in the habit, so pleasantly preoccupied with what I’d buy and what I’d cook, that I wasn’t considering how it made Kate feel to have a refrigerator full of food she couldn’t eat. I nibbled away at whatever I made, told the others it was there, but it was getting awkward, I had to admit. Finally I ventured, “The other caregivers?”
She observed me for a second, then shrugged. “Well,” she said, “why don’t we try to eat together when the evening shifts overlap? Then you have someone to cook for, and I get to taste something besides shakes.”
I was torn, but only for a moment, before I agreed. I didn’t really want to eat with Hillary and Simone, but I could. I’d get to know them. And it was a chance to keep up the cooking, which seemed like too important a part of our time together to stop. The house being empty of food, no smells of baking or simmering—it would have been another reminder of everything that wasn’t going very well. Just because Evan left, suddenly we should stop enjoying ourselves?
He had rented an apartment downtown, according to Kate, and throughout that fall I found myself scanning passing cars and pedestrians for his face. I saw him only once, a few weeks after Kate and I decided I’d cook for all of us. I’d been walking around the Wednesday farmers’ market at the capitol when I should have been in class.
I was holding a quart of ground-cherries and wondering whether Kate would know what to do with them. They looked like tiny Japanese lanterns, each greenish-gold berry encased in a papery shell, crisp as an insect’s wing. I peeled back the translucent casing and tasted the fruit thoughtfully: It was barely sweet, tasted faintly of apples, and its seeds popped between my teeth like the seeds of a fig. I ate another and glanced around, considering how they’d be cooked with butter, when I saw Evan at another table across the lawn, his gray suit jacket flapping in the cold wind. The mild fall temperatures had dropped down to a real chill in the past week, and he ought to have been wearing a heavy winter coat, but I had seen his charcoal wool overcoat still hanging in Kate’s closet. I watched Evan buy a single pear, the wind blowing his hair into a sunny haze around his skull. He patted it down and walked away, tucking the pear in his pocket. When he was gone I shook my head apologetically at the farmer and left without buying anything. I’d strolled up to the market because I knew Liam was meeting a colleague at a restaurant near the capitol for lunch. When he mentioned the lunch, I’d known I’d skip class that day. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to see him unawares, but instead I’d gotten Evan. It was just as well. Liam wasn’t dumb. He’d know if he glimpsed me what I was doing there. It was too humiliating to think about.
I headed east beyond the capitol and toward Lake Monona to walk home. As I passed the restaurants I glanced in the windows, but I didn’t see Liam, just my own hair blowing around my face, the red blur of my wool peacoat. Since when had I regressed to sneaking after him? It was not a good sign. It wasn’t that I thought he would be having lunch with yet another woman—in fact, I felt strangely complacent about that; a Ph.D. program simply didn’t allow the time for more than two—but we had been so distant lately that I was curious. What did he do these days, when he wasn’t with me and wasn’t with her? Did he retreat to diners and out of the way coffee shops just to be alone? I pictured him jogging furtively down the back streets, head
down, beleaguered by women.
We seemed to be stopping and starting every time we met. We’d made up after our last argument, and for a few weeks in a row everything was effortless. Then, for no reason I could quite discern, one date had been weirdly passionless, awkward, and stilted. It threw me off completely. As I’d walked him to the door, exchanging cocktail party chatter about the weather and our jobs, I steeled myself to say something lighthearted but pointed about moving on to other things.
Yet in the space of a few seconds as we turned to one another, I lost the nerve to end it altogether, and instead tried to think of something to say that would only nudge us apart, just to try it out, instead of something irrevocable. The gentlest little elbow to the ribs, perhaps, a white lie or an excuse for skipping our next date. I thought I wanted a little distance, though to achieve what I wasn’t certain. He stopped at the front door, cupped my face in his hands, and kissed my mouth, my cheeks, my forehead. I lifted my face to let him kiss me wherever he liked and didn’t say a thing.
The following Thursday I got a break anyway. His wife suggested they go away for a long weekend, and so by the next time I saw him after a two-week interval, I felt as though I’d been isolated in a glass cube for months. I met him at the door, took in the strip of windburn across the bridge of his nose, the gold tips of his eyelashes and eyebrows. I could have sworn his eyes were darker green than they had been two weeks ago. I wrapped my arms around his rib cage, hooked my legs around his ankles, just wanting that sensation of his bulk, to feel the give when I locked my fingers at the small of his back, and squeezed, as though I were testing my own strength. He’d lifted me when he came in the front door, as easily as if I were half his height, resting my butt on the table and weaving his fingers through my hair when he pressed his mouth to my neck, my ear. Why would I give up someone who mirrored me this way; who, when I pushed up against him, pushed back just as firmly as I wanted him to? I had once thought if we avoided each other for an extra week or so our relationship would dissipate before we’d even realized it, but it had proved more elastic than I had thought. If I didn’t call him on a day when I usually phoned, I’d come home to find a message from him on my machine. That extra week between dates hadn’t weakened a thing.
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