Already, by the time they’d moved, she’d stopped working. At the school where they enrolled the children, lots of mothers did drop-off in expensive exercise wear that flattered their svelte figures, then did pickup in the same expensive exercise wear; whether they had exercised in the intervening hours wasn’t clear. Their hair was stylishly cut and dyed, and some of them underwent cosmetic surgery procedures, procedures other than Botox, with which Julie had previously been unfamiliar: hyaluronic-acid lip filling and laser resurfacing and abdominoplasties. In the air she breathed, there was much football, hunting, and Christianity, though Houston was big and diverse enough that she could sneak away for a solo lunch at a Sri Lankan restaurant, or do phone banking for a pro-choice congressional candidate in a tight race.
In her younger years, when single, Julie had thought of herself as a big-boobed, curly-haired, high-spirited Jewish girl, and she had heard rumors of men who appreciated these qualities, but she had not encountered them personally; perhaps, she thought, they clustered on the coasts. By the time she and Graham started playing I’ll Think It, You Say It, she was no longer big-boobed (the one procedure she underwent, after nursing three kids, was a breast reduction and lift), not curly-haired (she had regular blowouts and tried to believe that the formaldehyde in the straightening lotion was offset by purchasing almost exclusively organic produce), and barely Jewish (Keith was Episcopal, and while Julie’s attendance at temple was spotty, they always celebrated Christmas). Also, she wasn’t really that high-spirited anymore, though neither was she unhappy. Keith worked long hours but made a lot of money, and he was rarely grumpy, often boyishly upbeat, and generally appreciative of the ways in which she exerted herself on behalf of their household. When initiating sex in bed at night, he’d say in a warm tone, “Is your vagina open for business?” Which, admittedly, caused her to cringe but was the result of a time years before when she’d had a UTI and told him her vagina was closed, so she was at least partly to blame.
At the Hutchinsons’ anniversary party, Graham said to her, “I hope you’re a huge bitch who usually manages to keep her bitchiness concealed. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
Julie laughed. It wasn’t that talking to Graham had made her feel lovestruck, not remotely, not then. It was more that it had made her feel big-boobed, curly-haired, high-spirited, and Jewish. Even if it was only by that point symbolic rather than literal, it had made her feel like herself.
* * *
—
For many months—for the next year—Julie was fine. She’d look for Graham at parties or on the sidelines of athletic fields, but casually, not frantically, and sometimes they’d speak for twenty minutes and sometimes just for three or four. They never played the game in front of other people, including either of their spouses, but in some ways the suspension of the game created an even more pleasing undercurrent than actually playing it.
Once, at pickup after a seventh birthday party attended by both of their youngest children—Julie’s son, Lucas, was in the same grade as Graham’s daughter Macy—Graham sidled up to her and said, “I’ll think it, you say it?”
Julie smiled but shook her head. “There’s no time.” The party had featured a bounce house on the host family’s enormous front lawn, and already the children’s shoes were back on and goody bags were being distributed.
“Oh, please,” Graham said. “There’s always time for a quickie.”
“In that case,” Julie said, and she began quietly laying into the birthday boy’s parents, evangelicals who owned a national chain of highly successful fast casual restaurants. But Graham’s expression of possible amusement or skepticism made her pause, and she said, “Although maybe you disagree with me?”
“No, no,” Graham said quickly. “Unless I tell you otherwise, you should assume we’re in total agreement.”
There was something strange about the happiness this comment induced in Julie, and it took her until later in the day, long after her departure from the party, to figure out what it was: Despite the location of its origins, it had been a happiness wholly unattached to her children; it had been a grown-up happiness.
* * *
—
On the October night that Keith came home from work and mentioned that Graham and Gayle had separated and were getting a divorce—he seemed to consider the news sad but unremarkable, and was surprised Julie didn’t already know—Julie’s agitation was so immediate, extreme, and difficult to conceal from Keith that surely something untoward had been percolating in her all along. The upending of her equilibrium—it was disastrous and thrilling. She truly had not known it was still possible to feel this kind of physical excitement.
In bed that night, she lay awake hour after hour and considered the situation from every angle, vacillating between lucidity and craziness. She and Graham were, obviously, in love with each other. He had left Gayle for her. (Obviously, he had not left Gayle for her.) They needed to be extremely careful, to treat their attraction like a pipe bomb. Or maybe life was short and they owed it to themselves to take advantage of every precious moment, possibly by fucking in a supply closet at River Oaks Country Club.
They would never acknowledge it.
She would say something the next time she saw him.
After three A.M., Julie fell asleep, and she woke before five, resolute. The next time she saw Graham, she’d say nothing out of the ordinary and simply use the opportunity to acquire data.
At no point had she previously considered cheating on Keith; indeed, she’d felt slightly terrified by the divorces of other couples, as if they were a communicable disease. But apparently life contained surprises. Second acts! She was forty-four.
* * *
—
Oddly, Julie couldn’t remember whether she and Graham were in the habit of embracing when they greeted each other. Usually not, she concluded, or maybe not during the day but sometimes at adult events, at night, when alcohol was or would be involved.
Gayle came without him to a black-tie fundraiser for cancer research, after Julie had taken particular care with her appearance in anticipation of seeing him there. (Uncomfortably, Julie actually liked Gayle. She was pretty and kind, a petite woman with a brunette bob, and she’d always struck Julie, though maybe this was erroneous, as someone who found being a mother and a volunteer gratifying and sufficient.)
Julie finally saw Graham at a high school girls’ basketball game on a Saturday afternoon; Julie’s oldest and Graham’s middle child were a year apart but on the same team. Julie climbed up the bleachers and sat with him, her heart hammering. He was alone, and she’d come with Lucas, who was scampering around the basketball court’s periphery. Julie frowned and said, “I’m sorry about you and Gayle,” and then she had difficulty listening to him because she was thinking about what she’d say next, what it might reveal about her, and whether he’d find it funny. Also, when was the part when they’d have sex?
He raised his eyebrows in a rueful way and said, “Divorce is the worst, Julie. The very, very worst. But Gayle’s and mine has been a long time coming.”
“Everything is so complicated, isn’t it?” Julie said.
Graham turned his head, and his expression was odd—it was both mournful and a little arch. He said, “Thank you for existing with me in this cosmos.”
It was early November, and she decided to maintain the status quo until January because she didn’t want to actively be cheating on Keith for what was probably the last Christmas that their youngest child would believe in Santa; she wanted to enjoy the holidays with a heart that was, if not uncorrupted, then only passively corrupt. She’d move forward with Graham in the new year.
* * *
—
For the lunch where Julie was planning to confess her love, her criteria for the restaurant had been a place where (1) it wouldn’t be weird to order a glass of wine and (2) they were unlikely to run into people they
knew. She decided on the restaurant inside the Four Seasons, which soon seemed humiliating—of course she’d considered the convenience of adjourning to a room, though she was planning on Graham being the one to suggest the adjournment. She’d contacted Graham by email, the first email she’d ever sent him, and she’d guessed correctly at his work email address based on Keith’s. I wonder if you’re free to have lunch next week, she’d written, and he’d written back, Hi Julie! I can’t do next week, but I can do Tues or Fri of the week after.
Graham arrived ten minutes late, seeming preoccupied in exactly the way Keith was when his attention got pulled from office matters during the day; if anything, Graham seemed less chipper than Keith would under such circumstances. Later she guessed that Graham had imagined she was about to ask him to, say, join the host committee for the annual gala of the homeless shelter on whose board Julie served. Or possibly he’d thought she was hoping to fix him up with a single woman she knew; no doubt this had begun happening, which was part of why Julie couldn’t delay. At the time, though, Julie had thought that Graham knew, more or less, why she’d invited him to lunch, and even afterward she wasn’t convinced she’d been wrong.
By the time he sat, she’d already consumed most of her glass of white wine. They discussed Graham’s older son’s college applications (his first choice was Duke, though Graham considered this unrealistic). After they’d placed their orders with the waiter, Graham leaned in and said, “What’s up?”
He was wearing a gray suit, a light blue shirt, and a dark blue tie with red stripes, and he was painfully attractive to her. He had hazel eyes with crow’s-feet around them, a strong jaw, and completely gray hair, though he was only a year older than Julie.
She said, “This is hard to say—” and paused and looked at him, and there was nothing encouraging in his expression. If anything, a kind of cloudiness had overtaken his face. So should she have stopped? Or was some ritual degradation necessary, and if she hadn’t gone through with it in the moment, she’d just have had to enact it in the future? She said, “Lately, I’ve been having trouble sleeping. Ever since I heard that you and Gayle had separated—I keep picturing you and me—”
Six months after Lucas was born, Julie had been shopping alone at a boutique, examining a tunic on a hanger, when a fellow shopper, a chic woman about thirty years her senior, had said, “That looks comfy!” The woman had lightly patted her own midsection and added with a smile, “Not much longer for you, I’m guessing?” That the woman assumed she was pregnant wasn’t as horrifying to Julie as the prospect of what they’d both do when Julie had to reveal she wasn’t. She was flustered enough that it didn’t occur to her that she could simply pretend the woman was correct, and her focus was on preventing the woman from explicitly articulating her assumption. Julie extended one arm, palm out, as if to physically stop the next words. She said, overly warmly and loudly, “They sell so much great stuff here, don’t they?” Then she hastily rehung the tunic and bolted from the store.
Graham did a variation on this. He said, interrupting her, “Julie—no—I don’t think—” They both were silent for a few confusing but probably terrible seconds. “I don’t—” Graham said, then paused again, then said, “You and Keith seem like you have a good marriage, and God knows how rare those are. That’s not something to trifle with.”
She shouldn’t have offered a counterargument, right? But she said, “I think about you all the time. I feel a way I haven’t felt since I was a teenager.”
“Keith is my co-worker, Julie. And with our kids and school—” They made excruciating eye contact, and Graham said, “It’s a nonstarter.”
“Do you not feel like we connect in some unusual way?”
He shrugged. “You’re fun to talk to. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything beyond itself.”
Although her internal organs had begun to liquefy and collapse, it seemed important to conceal this from him.
“So,” he said. Another silence ensued, and he added, “An eighty-five-degree day in January, huh? I guess it’s getting pretty hard to dismiss global warming.” Astonishingly, they segued into an ordinary conversation, a conversation that under normal circumstances, with anyone else, would have given her tired face. He had ordered shrimp risotto, and she had ordered salad, and he picked up the check, which seemed unsurprising but still gracious. Also astonishingly, even though the lunch had been worse than she possibly could have imagined, she didn’t wish for it to be over; in spite of everything, she liked being in his presence.
Outside, on the sidewalk, in what was obviously their last minute together, he said in a serious voice, “I want to make sure you know”—and she thought he was about to provide consolation—“that it’s not like I wish we could be together under different circumstances. I was never romantically interested in you. Never. At all.” The sentiment seemed more legalistic than mean, not that the two were mutually exclusive. There was also something legalistic in the way he seemed to be awaiting her acknowledgment.
“Okay,” she said.
“You realize, don’t you, that you weren’t saying what I thought? You were saying what you thought. I was just listening.”
“Okay,” she said again.
Clearly, they couldn’t kiss or hug. He looked at her with trepidation and concern, said, “Take care of yourself,” and patted her shoulder.
She watched him retreat down the block, and when he reached the crosswalk, she reentered the lobby of the Four Seasons, found a bathroom, shut herself in a stall, and bawled.
* * *
—
Twenty days had passed since she and Graham had had lunch, and Julie was, when by herself, still crying frequently. This was why, on the morning of chaperoning the field trip to the Butterfly Center, Julie told Lucas’s teacher that she needed to pick up a prescription and, instead of riding the bus, would meet them there. Because Julie stopped crying when she passed Dunlavy Street, she had enough time to recover and look mostly normal before joining the students, teachers, and other parents (which, of course, meant other mothers).
In the last three weeks, Julie and Graham had had no contact. Though she’d seen him from a distance at the girls’ basketball tournament, they hadn’t spoken; the sight of him across the high school gym had made her realize that in the short term, she would miss him as the person she’d lain awake in the middle of the night imagining being naked with, but in the long term what she’d miss was their conversations.
At the natural science museum, Julie parked on the north side. Like the majority of women she knew, she drove an SUV, hers a black BMW. She pulled off her sunglasses before peering at her face in the mirror on the sun visor. Her eyes were only marginally more bloodshot than usual, and her lips, which sometimes swelled when she cried, were their regular size. She put her sunglasses back on and climbed from the car.
The school buses had discharged their freight, and when she joined the throng on the plaza in front of the museum, the second graders were leaping around and jostling one another. Lucas, along with his best friend, Drew, was climbing on a railing on the steps. She waved, and Lucas, who was the most easygoing of her children, waved back; he didn’t feel the need to either publicly cling to or ignore her. Many times, with other adults, Julie had winkingly referred to Lucas as her oops baby, because of the age gap between him and his sisters, but she didn’t anticipate using the term, with its subtext of sloppy spontaneous marital passion, ever again.
Julie found Mrs. Ackerburg, who was Lucas’s teacher.
“Here’s your group.” Mrs. Ackerburg handed Julie a piece of paper with a typed list of names on it and added, “I’ve paired you with Gayle Nelson.”
Julie hoped her sunglasses concealed her dismay: She hadn’t known that Graham’s wife—or ex-wife, depending on what stage of the divorce proceedings they were in—would be here. Gayle definitely hadn’t been part of the group emails M
rs. Ackerburg had sent. Aloud, Julie said, “Great,” then looked around to locate Gayle. Sure enough, she was standing near her daughter Macy.
Julie pretended she hadn’t seen her and approached Lucas. “Hey, squirt,” she said, and he said, “Hi, Mom.” Lucas was four feet tall, with blond curls.
“We were out of cheddar, so I put Swiss on your sandwich for lunch today,” she said. “Just so you’re not surprised.”
“Okay,” Lucas said.
“And there’s chips,” Julie said. “And an apple.”
Lucas looked at her with benign curiosity, and Julie thought that this might be her lowest moment yet—worse than all her lustful daydreams about a man other than her husband, worse than her recent months of preoccupation, worse even than unsuccessfully throwing herself at Graham.
“Darth Vader is stronger than Sidious and Obi-Wan put together,” Lucas’s friend Drew said. “And he survived in the river of lava.”
A whistle blew, and the children lined up; Mrs. Ackerburg and the two other second-grade teachers took turns reading names aloud so the kids knew where to stand.
Gayle appeared next to Julie and murmured, “There’s something I want to ask you.”
Julie tried to sound neutral as she said, “Sure.” She had no idea whether Gayle had ever suspected anything; it was possible she hadn’t and also possible that Gayle had suspected before Julie herself did. But Julie doubted that Graham had told her about their lunch.
“This spring is Mrs. Ackerburg’s twenty-fifth anniversary at the school,” Gayle said. “Paula and Jen and I were thinking all the families in the class should go in on a gift certificate, but do you think she’d rather have one to a restaurant or a spa?”
“Oh,” Julie said. “Well, you could split the difference, right? And do both? I’m happy to contribute.”
“If it were me, I’d prefer the spa. I think Sanctuary is really nice.”
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