The Most Fun We Ever Had

by Claire Lombardo

  “Gillian…”

  “I just— I need to— I like you so much. I’m never happier than when I’m with you, lately,” she said. And though he realized the same was true for him, he knew he could never admit it, that to do so would be damning, forever, even if Marilyn never found out. “It’s just easy with you, you know?”

  “I’m married, Gillian.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so anxious. “I can’t— This isn’t—” He reached down and took her hand, lifted it away from his leg. “You’re my friend. I’m flattered. But—”

  “I’m not crazy.”

  He swallowed. “You’re not crazy.”

  She smiled at him sadly. “You’re too nice for your own good.”

  “I should get going.”

  She hadn’t yet moved. “Back to the Arctic.” Eye contact that lasted a second too long. She leaned in closer. “Thanks for your company, David.”

  She kissed him—dry, quick, like a goodnight—and was gone.

  * * *

  —

  When he got home he was surprised to find Marilyn awake, reading on the couch in what didn’t seem like enough light.

  “Hey,” he said. The house was quiet. She didn’t look at him. He was unused to seeing her stationary like this; lately when he came home she was either going full speed—packing lunches, keeping an eye on Wendy, trying to assure the other girls that their parents were still wholly extant beings, still available should they, too, God forbid, find themselves in crisis—or dead asleep. “Hi, sweetie,” he repeated, and finally her eyes traveled upward, slowly, like they could just barely be bothered to register him.

  “I called you,” she said finally, flatly, and his heart immediately started racing.

  “Oh.”

  “Six weeks,” she said. She set down her book. “Adrian said you switched to volunteering at the clinic in the mornings six weeks ago.”

  “Why were you calling?” he asked, still trying to hang on to some modicum of normalcy, though he knew, then, that he had irrevocably ruined something, he hoped not everything.

  “I put Gracie to bed early. The girls are out and about. I was seeing if you wanted to have dinner.” Very few things that she possibly could have said would have made him feel more terrible. He came into the living room and sat in a chair across from her. He could see, through her indignant playacting, that she was trying not to cry.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, honey, I was…” He stopped. Changing his schedule without telling her was one thing, but outright lying was another entirely. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what? What have you been doing?” She didn’t sound angry so much as wounded. “You’ve been getting home so late.”

  He’d never been able to lie convincingly. “I went to get dinner with Gillian.”

  “With—my Gillian?”

  He paused. Of course it made sense for Marilyn to identify her that way: her doctor. Because while Marilyn saw Gillian maybe ten times a few years ago and he saw her nearly every day, Marilyn’s ten times had been far more intimate. My Gillian. Her Gillian, of course, because Gillian had delivered their youngest daughter.

  Oh, Christ, he was an asshole.

  “Just dinner,” he said quietly.

  “It’s after eleven.” She now sounded decidedly hurt. “That’s kind of a long dinner.” It wasn’t a long dinner for him and Marilyn; on rare nights when they had a sitter they would meander sweetly into the wee hours, drinking wine and then walking it off languidly around the city before they drove back to the suburbs. It was a long night for him with anyone but his wife.

  “We were just talking,” he said. “Lots of—just stuff at the office. Lots to talk about.”

  In fact they hadn’t talked about work at all. And this was worse. He knew it with certainty now, looking at his tired, pretty wife, wounded on their couch, imagining the worst for possibly the first time in their marriage. Because it was the same at their four-year anniversary or their fourteenth: he was never concerned that Marilyn would stray, and vice versa.

  “I’d argue that we’ve also had quite a bit to talk about,” she said. “Perhaps you and I would benefit from an hour or five of conversation over dinner.” And then she seemed to notice herself, her submissive posture and the weakness of her voice, and she sat up straight and met his eyes. “You know I trust you,” she said evenly. “But you get why this might make me feel—not great?” A conversational ease had crept back into their dialogue and he started to relax.

  “It was really nothing, honey.”

  “Has it been going on for six weeks?”

  He froze again. “Well,” he said. Her face fell. “We just kind of fell into a habit,” he said. “We’ve both been really stressed out.”

  She laughed meanly. “Well, in that case,” she said.

  “Marilyn.”

  “No. By all means, if you’re the only two really stressed-out people left on earth, go ahead. Spend all the time you want with her. Don’t bother coming home; it’s like a goddamn Buddhist retreat around here so I can see why you wouldn’t feel comfortable bringing your stress to me. I probably wouldn’t recognize it if it punched me in the face.”

  “In fairness, it’s not like you’ve been so forthcoming with me.”

  She paled in her lively Irish way, a deathly whiteness with two spots of color high on her cheeks that betrayed she was livid. “Because you won’t listen,” she said. “I’ve tried to talk to you and you don’t want to hear it. And in fairness, I haven’t found a replacement who goes out to dinner with me.”

  Again he clammed up; Marilyn’s anger was extremely rare but lethal when it did make an appearance.

  “Do you understand why that offends me?” she asked. “Do you get why that hurts me? That you’d rather go talk to a colleague than to me? Because all I want to do lately is talk to you, David. And if the feeling isn’t mutual, then—fine. I don’t know. But I wish you could at least do me the courtesy of telling me that.” She was clearly on the verge of tears but still wasn’t crying.

  He had rebuffed Gillian’s advances. He’d been so close to being with another woman and had chosen his wife instead. He had a pleasant, easy outlet, a friend with whom he could spend unencumbered evenings, and it was so much more palatable than the stress of their home, and yet here he was, with Marilyn, as ever. And suddenly something gave way and he was furious, all of his guilt and sadness overpowered by a potent and specific anger. He’d done everything he was supposed to. He’d always done everything he was supposed to, especially tonight, especially when there was another woman in his car and he’d played his Marilyn card; he’d chosen Marilyn over everything else, like always, and so what the hell did he have to feel bad about?

  “You don’t understand why I haven’t felt able to talk to you lately? You’re like a ghost, Marilyn. You’re the one shutting me out. You’re the one who refuses to acknowledge that anything’s happening. And you’re such a fucking martyr that even if you did admit that, all we’d hear about is how hard things are for you.” He froze then, acutely aware of the sensation in his bones, the feeling of having overstepped his bounds, their bounds, unspoken bounds that they’d erected years ago and agreed not to cross. He’d risen from his seat at some point during the last minute and was aware of himself looming over her, face warm from the two cocktails he’d had during dinner. “Shit,” he said softly, weakening. He would have apologized then, but she had untangled her limbs and was sitting up straight, rigid, on the couch. She was watching him with such distinct hurt but also with her own breed of anger, and he knew that it was too late to take back what he’d said. After a minute she stood up and went to the kitchen and he heard a drawer slam and then smelled the unmistakable indoor scent of a cigarette.

  He followed her. She was leaning against the sink and had the window propped open and was smoking mechanicall
y, severely, eyes still threatening to spill over.

  “This is the problem with you,” she said finally. “You’re so nice until you’re not. And then you’re the biggest asshole on the planet. Why have I never heard any of this before? If I’ve just been consistently fucking things up, why haven’t you mentioned it?”

  “I didn’t mean that,” he said, and she regarded him curiously. “I mean—I meant some of it. But not— Jesus, honey, I’m overwhelmed, okay? I don’t know what to do with that.”

  “I have a couple of ideas that don’t involve you dating my obstetrician.”

  “I’m not dating her. Jesus Christ, we’ve had dinner a few times.” Gillian’s lips on his: the thing he decided, right then, that he would never mention. But then: “Talking to her is a hell of a lot more pleasant than this.”

  “So sorry I haven’t made things more fun for you.” She turned her back to him, smoking out the window, and then she told him flatly, drama-free, to sleep in the guest room. “Or on the couch. I don’t care. Sleep on the lawn. But if the kids see you, you’re explaining it to them.”

  “What am I supposed to—?”

  “You’re on your own, David. Just try not to traumatize them.”

  He had not slept in a room without his wife, save for evenings when the children encroached upon their space, in nearly twenty years.

  “But tomorrow—” Help, he wanted to say. He wanted her to hear it in his voice. Help me out here. Nothing on her face indicated that she registered his desperation. “Honey.” Look at me, honey. They didn’t do things like this. They never fulfilled those faddish clichés of their bored, swanky neighbors. They fought sometimes, sure, but they never slept apart. It never seemed worth it to sacrifice that part of their day, when they were safely, warmly together, the part when they could kiss and grope and talk like teenagers if they wanted, unafraid of the discerning youthful filters of their children. She started upstairs and then stopped, not turning to face him.

  “Tell them we had an argument. Don’t tell them why. We can deal with that later.” She went up another stair and then paused again. “This isn’t an argument, though.” Another step. “For your own reference.” She paused for just a second, and then she disappeared from his view.

  Long after she had fallen asleep, he crept into their room and was sitting on the edge of the bed, careful not to wake her. Her face was puffy from crying, he assumed, though she hadn’t shed a single tear in front of him. (That pack of cigarettes in the junk drawer, though: that had surprised him.) It was all he could do not to wrap himself tearfully around her body, like Gracie did after a tantrum. The instincts his daughters had in childhood were actually often not far from his own feelings toward his wife—to hug, to grab, to allow her to bury and protect and engulf; because despite what he’d just said, she was the most comforting presence he had ever known.

  He let his eyes wander around the room, adjusting to the darkness. There was a board book on the nightstand, which meant that she’d let Gracie come into their bed for her story time. Militant stacks of laundry in a basket in the corner, waiting for distribution. In the window: a few of his shirts hanging from the curtain rod, back from the dry cleaner’s. Though they were fighting, though things between them were worse than they had ever been, though those things were clearly pervading the atmosphere of the house—quieting their daughters, making them anxious—she was persisting. She was taking care of their children and their clothing, their quiet life, all manners of tucking in and folding and cuddling and driving, picking up and dropping off, and he was lying to his wife and his children and his patients so he could go have cocktails with a woman who was kind and capable, whose company brought him undeniable pleasure, but who didn’t have the same ties he did, a single woman who reminded him, in fact, quite a bit of his wife, but who would only ever be his friend. A single woman who seemed more aware of this tension than he was. He rested a hand very gently on his wife’s shoulder just to remind himself of her, the person who’d brought him to life. No wonder she’d been crying. No wonder she kept secret cigarettes more than five years after she’d quit. No wonder she’d relegated him to the living room. He was a child. His wife was married to a child.

  He remembered feeling a similar inadequacy the night Wendy was born. Marilyn was twenty-two and more frightened than he had ever seen her, terrified of motherhood and its ironclad accompanying responsibility—but the minute Wendy arrived, the very second he laid her, squalling, on her mother’s chest, Marilyn shifted. She came of age instantaneously and suddenly she was Wendy’s mom; she was in her element and everything clicked. And he stood there, his eyes filled with tears, a brand-new and unexpected panic roiling in his gut. And it had been the same thing three times over—another girl, another girl, another girl—despite mounting responsibility and the steady accumulation of debt and details and obligations and years, simple numerical age. Each time his wife shifted fluidly into the mother of two, then three, then four; into a homeowner, a bookkeeper, a crisis counselor, a chauffeur. Caring for their house and their children while also tending to his aging father—Richard now declining, on dialysis, and in need of at-home nursing care—to their rambunctious dog, to him. She did this, and the structure of his daily life remained relatively unchanged, and yet he was the one fucking things up. He, on this terrible night, had given her one more enormous crisis, a ten-foot wave of malicious ineptitude. And she—his lovely wife—had cried herself to sleep, landing in a contorted position that would have been funny under better circumstances.

  * * *

  —

  Liza had been planning on going to a friend’s house that night, but in fact she was home, home to hear her father come in from the garage; home to hear her mother’s voice, scary in its cool measurement, say the name Gillian again and again; home to smell cigarette smoke from the kitchen; home to hear her mother retreat to her bedroom and sob, the most frightening noise she’d ever heard.

  Gillian, Gillian, Gillian. She’d heard her name dozens of times: her father’s partner, her mother’s doctor, the woman who’d saved her baby sister and her mom. But she was more than that, clearly, the catalyst for something. A major player in this terrible year they were having, during the time that Wendy was under informal house arrest and their entire family was abiding by a ridiculous meal plan that prominently featured red meat and fish, though Liza had been contemplating an experiment with vegetarianism. Their house was chaos; after Wendy’s “incident” with the pills her dad began working more and her mom threw herself full-throttle into Wendy’s care. Was her father having an affair? It was unthinkable, but she also couldn’t come up with another reason for her mother to be crying like she was. To be smoking cigarettes in the house—to be smoking cigarettes period—like she was.

  Her parents had spent that night apart—Gillian, Gillian, Gillian—her father on the couch and her mother weeping in their bedroom, and Liza curled, sleepless, under her covers, wanting to tell her sisters, afraid to tell her sisters, utterly confused.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Bastard.”

  Liza heard her father’s voice sharply from the kitchen, not muted like the lilt of her mother, a harsh bass note over the melodic rise and fall of David, please and Keep your voice down. She’d just delivered the news of Ryan’s departure to her parents and was seated on the couch, hands folded primly in her lap, feeling like some kind of defiled virgin, a ruined high school sophomore. She’d made a feeble joke about conscious uncoupling that neither seemed to understand. Her mother’s face had drained of color and her father’s, compensating, reddened vividly, and her mother had risen from her seat in the rocking chair and come over to sit beside her and said Oh, sweetheart, and held her hand; her father, meanwhile, had stood up, paced a few lengths back and forth across the living room, the dog rising with intrigue to follow him.

  “Let’s get you some tea,” her mom had said finally, squeezing Liza’s
knee before she rose. “Come help me make some tea, honey,” she’d said pointedly to David, stopping him midstride. She’d seen, in profile, her mother’s raised eyebrows, and her father had consented, compliant as a child, and followed her into the kitchen. He still hadn’t met Liza’s eyes.

  Which led to the “bastard” and the clink of mugs and Liza sitting alone, the dog coming over to her to shove his wet black snout between her thighs. He glanced in both directions and then loped onto the couch, long limbs like a horse, and settled next to her. Pets on the furniture were strictly forbidden in her parents’ house, but Loomis was nimble and wily, their final child at home, and he got away with more than most. The dog rested his head in her lap and she stroked the soft bristles of his fur. She was good with dogs; dogs had always liked her; she would be fine as a single parent; why wouldn’t her father look at her?

  She thought of the word bastard and applied it—though of course her father had been referring to Ryan—to the feeble movement inside of her: she was, technically, now carrying a bastard child, was she not? She heard the teakettle whistle and then her father returned.

  “Loomis, get down from there,” he said, and the next thing she knew her dad was sitting next to her in the dog’s spot, placing a rough hand on her head, petting the hair at her crown. “It’s going to be fine, you know,” he said, and something about this made her start to cry, something about the familiar weight of her father’s hand and the fact that he’d broken from his repressive masculine shell to come and comfort her. It made her at once want to submit to his touch—move back in with her parents and let them raise her baby and live forever as a child in an adult’s body—and feel completely convinced that it was going to be fine. “You’re a wonderfully capable person, Liza. This baby is very lucky already because of that alone. Let your mother make you some tea and we’ll go from there, okay?”

  She laughed in spite of herself into the familiar cottony human smell of his shirt.