She always felt this way when she left Chad’s place: overly cautious. In the first few minutes of being back alone in her car, she’d convince herself that she was being followed, watched from afar by a spy—although it was never, in her mind, actually Russell who was following her. He was somehow too far removed from the situation to be a possible interloper in her affair. The idea of Russell haunted her more than the actual, physical person of Russell. In her cruel imagination, it was always someone else, someone with Russell’s best interests at heart, who would expose her.
As she inserted the keys in the ignition, she saw—parked two cars ahead—a blue Malibu with two young men inside. Charlie’s friend Dale drove the same car. He was always picking Charlie up for school and sometimes on the weekends. As she looked closer, she realized it was Dale and that was Charlie next to him sitting in the front seat. Those two are always together, she thought, and of course she was happy for it. Charlie was entirely too attached to his studies. Never once went out on a Friday night, except with Dale this past year. It had pained her to see him without a group of friends, like Dena had. He stayed at the library all hours then went to the public library in town once the school’s had closed. If it weren’t for Dale, the poor thing never would have left the house at all for a non-library reason. She admired Dale for always being such a good friend to Charlie. Dale was much more in line with the kind of son she thought Russell might’ve always wanted: sportier, with an enthusiasm for weightlifting and football. You could tell a lot about your children’s friends by how they spoke to you, and Dale always greeted Joan as if she were his own mother. So polite, wholesome, a wonderful young man. She’d found a T-shirt of his in Charlie’s hamper once. She brought it up to her nose and inhaled deeply, finding the smell of it comforting, like the scent of possibility in a recently purchased book.
She looked closer at the two of them, still keeping herself hidden, slunk down low in the bucket seat of her Volvo two cars behind. The boys appeared to be fighting. Dale was yelling at Charlie, and gesturing with his hands and arms a lot, and Charlie—her poor Charlie—was shaking his head and twisting one of his hands around the strap of the seatbelt, tethering his hand tighter and tighter, as if he were hanging on to it, dangling over a steep cliff.
They’re having a lovers’ quarrel, she thought. It was unmistakable. She would’ve guessed it if she’d only been a random passerby.
Dale turned away from Charlie and peered out the window. His fingers traced some of the condensation that had collected near the edge. Charlie untethered himself from the strap and reached out to place his hand on Dale’s shoulder. The storm between them appeared to have passed. Dale turned to him and stared. He took Charlie’s glasses off and kissed him sweetly on the lips, just as Joan had done so many times before, saying good night to him when he was younger. But then Dale broke from the light kiss and began looking around furtively. Joan ducked down farther into her seat but could still see the two of them; the front seat of the car in front of her was reclined so that it gave her an unobstructed view. After scanning the area, Dale pulled Charlie toward him by the base of his neck and kissed him harder. So passionately it was almost startling. Charlie responded by grabbing on to Dale’s shoulder and squeezing it, bringing him in closer. The close contact between the two boys seemed to jolt Joan from being a voyeur to an active participant. She suddenly felt like an invader.
She glanced at a scrunched-up straw wrapper on the floor of her car. Then she turned on the radio. It was “Misty,” a soft piano version. Charlie really was hers after all. There was very little doubt of that now. They were both transgressors in a way, keeping secrets from those closest to them. You love who you love even when the world makes that love impossible. Or you lust. Suddenly the fact that they both were partaking in something illicit made her feel even closer to him. It made her love him more than she already did, which was too much, she’d always told herself. More than Dena. Maybe even more than Russell.
No, definitely more than Russell.
JOAN FED CORAL the carrots first. For some reason, Coral thought they were the best thing in the world. It must have been the bright color and the bit of extra sugar Joan mixed into the baby food. She inevitably turned everything into a dessert, thinking the baby would eat it faster that way. She grabbed the grocery list off the fridge with one hand while holding Coral in the other.
Dena watched her from the kitchen table. Her arms were crossed, and her brown eyes bore into Joan. “I don’t know why you’re trying to make this into a grocery trip for my benefit. You don’t need to cover this up with another transparent excuse. Your lame fucking lies. I know where you’re going,” she said in a voice Joan never had heard before. Stern and unforgiving, like a distrustful parent, a tone neither she nor Russell ever had adopted in the rare instances they’d punished her. Joan always had felt as if she were acting whenever she’d tried to inject seriousness into her commands and knew Dena always saw right through it.
“Don’t say ‘fucking’ to me, young lady.”
“Fuck you! You knew I liked him, and you went and fucked him anyway. How many times, Mom? How many times did he fuck you?”
“Honey, I didn’t realize you had a crush on him.”
“Don’t belittle it. And don’t call me ‘honey.’ You’re no more than a slut.”
“Dena, I need to pick some things up. I’ll be back soon. You can go meet your friends if you want. I don’t want your father encountering this when he walks through the door.” This meaning Dena, cold and blank, like a sociopath hooked up to a lie detector test.
“Don’t tell me what to do. You don’t get to tell me what to do ever again,” Dena shot back.
Coral giggled and clapped her tiny hands together as if Dena had told an especially funny joke. Joan hugged her, unsure whether the pounding in her chest was hers or the baby’s. She headed out the back door to the garage.
After fastening Coral in the car seat behind the driver’s seat, she sat down, holding the keys. She reached into her purse and pulled out her cell phone. She texted Chad to tell him that she was coming over in thirty minutes. She didn’t tell him why. By now Chad was used to getting last-minute texts from her like this one, alerting him to small snatches of time that had arisen in her schedule when she’d be able to meet him. She didn’t want to risk calling him and have Dena come out the door to find her talking to him.
She pulled out of the driveway and headed toward the grocery store. She really did need to pick up some things. She gazed out the window at the houses that lined the street. It was early enough in December for people to have already put up Christmas lights. They seemed to get more aggressive as she looked from house to house. A simple string of white lights tastefully strewn over a couple bushes near the front door gave way to oversize colored lights that snaked their way through gutters and piping, wrapped around a Santa Claus on a roof as if he were Joan of Arc. It all felt vaguely threatening.
Joan glanced in her rearview mirror and saw Coral’s hands grab at a hexagonal toy with a bell inside. It’s tinkling rang through her.
She pulled into the Safeway parking lot and surveyed the other cars. With the engine off, the chill in the air felt disquieting and unsettling. After an Indian summer, then a hasty fall, their recent descent into winter seemed premature. No one should be forced to end a relationship in the winter. It was inhuman.
Joan got a cart and placed Coral in the front, facing her. Coral, always so easy to manage and amuse, was delighted with all the colors, the neat, ordered groupings of produce, the bright-colored packaging of the cereals. For a child, a grocery store is a place of endless possibility.
She looked at the wide smile on Coral’s face, then recalled a moment that autumn when she’d considered the distinct possibility that Coral was retarded. She didn’t have the Mongoloid features of a Down-syndrome baby, but there was something too happy about Coral. Too simple. She was easily fascinated by weird sounds and colors, not in the normal way of a chi
ld discovering the world. It was as if she were discovering them anew each time. Joan wanted to get her into a language or an instrument as early as possible.
She placed several items in her cart: eggs, heirloom tomatoes for the salad she knew Charlie liked, Tampax for Dena, Grape-Nuts for Russell. Alongside the vibrating hum of the fluorescent lights above her, she heard “What I Did for Love” from A Chorus Line. It sounded far away, as if it were playing on a fairground outside the store. She and Russell had played that record in his first apartment. They’d played it loudly to drown out the sounds of his roommate making love on the other side of the wall. The song was about what it meant to give up dancing, but she felt what it had to say about the uneasiness of having to say good-bye to anything. It hurt no matter what it was: dancing, singing, a lover, your own life, your child. Losing anything is patently hideous.
The woman at the checkout counter was in her late fifties and wore a red smock with a name tag affixed above the “S” in Safeway. Her name was “Deborah!” She scanned each of Joan’s items, then placed them in a paper bag.
“What a sweet little girl. Your daughter is lovely,” she offered with a smile as she handed the bag to Joan.
“Yes, she is. But she’s not mine.” Joan exited through the sliding glass doors.
She pulled up to the curb outside of Chad’s house and turned off the car. In the early-evening dusk, an orange glow came from the front room where his couch cut the room into a diagonal. On the left-hand side, she saw the footstool he’d found in an alleyway that he’d fixed up and painted turquoise. A guitar was leaning up against a corner where the south and west walls met; he’d never played it, and she’d never asked about it. In many ways, he’d been the anti-Russell—manic with his interests, bookish to a fault, a heart-on-his-sleeve kind of guy. She could only imagine he would’ve eventually grown tired of their affair after too much longer. That was why she’d asked for the grade at its height. She could tell it would only have gone downhill from there. She got out of the car and crept down the flagstone walkway.
Chad answered the door shirtless, ready to take advantage of the unexpected visit.
“Dena knows. Everything. She knows everything,” Joan said as she brushed past him into the house.
“Oh, my God. How? Why?” Chad said, pulling her around to face him.
Terror washed over his face: the potential layoff, the tarnished career, the now-worthless résumé.
“I mentioned your…smell. It was a slip up. I don’t know why I said it. It just came out. People say things.”
“I can’t believe this. My smell?”
“You have one—like cinnamon mixed with fresh-cut grass. It’s something a girl notices.”
“Why would Dena have noticed?”
“She has a schoolgirl crush on you, Chad.”
“This is insane.”
“Look—she’s not going to say anything to Russell or anyone as long as I break things off with you right now. Tonight.”
“All things considered, this seems to be the best-case scenario, no?” He brushed up closer to her.
“I can handle Dena. I’ve done it for years. She talks big, but she’s just a frightened girl looking for her father’s approval. She’d never want to hurt him. She’d never tell.”
“As soon as you leave here, it’s over,” Chad said.
He brought her down to the couch and cradled her head in his hand as the last bit of their affair slipped out of him into her. She hadn’t climaxed like she had with Chad since before the twins. Before that, it had been with Gage, who’d made her come every time, without much effort. It was like certain men fit inside her perfectly, and others were just off. Like trying to put the rectangular peg in the circular slot.
He was getting closer; she felt it. He always ramped it up like this. So she grabbed his right buttock and moved him in faster. This was it. He looked at her—his wavy, thick hair hanging over his eyes, which were so bright. When they started to roll back in his head, she knew he was about to come, and she felt herself go too, and then they were rocking back and forth together like a horse pistoning up and down on a carousel, a child’s ride and then…
“Oh, God, Coral!”
“What?”
Joan got out from underneath him and scrambled for her underwear. “Where are my shoes? Where are my goddamn fucking shoes?”
“Joan, what’s happening?” Chad asked, still sweaty and naked.
“I left Coral in the car! She’s—she’s—oh, fuck, my shoes!” Wearing only a bra and underwear and holding her keys, she threw open the door and ran toward her car. The flagstone on her bare feet was ice cold, so she leapt onto the grass, which had become crinkled with ice. She approached the passenger side of the car and saw Coral on the other side with her face turned toward the window. Leaping over to the other side—the side of the car she only now realized she never should have had her daughter sitting on since it was directly behind her from the driver’s seat—she could see Coral’s eyes closed. She finally unlocked the door.
Her daughter was cold; she could feel that even through her clothes. She unlatched Coral from the baby seat and ran with her toward the house. After placing her on the couch, on top of the blankets upon which they’d had sex only minutes before, she rubbed the girl, the little angel, with her hands and the blankets. She didn’t even notice where Chad was, if he was there at all. All she cared about was her daughter, the little girl with the big smiles and peachy cheeks.
And then it happened just like that. Coral opened her eyes and seemed to look at her like nothing had happened at all.
A Goddess Lying Breathless in Carnage
WHOSOEVER COVETS THY neighbor’s wife, he shall never stray. Whosoever has woken up next to his wife but thought of his neighbor’s instead; whosoever has cherished the fact that his wife’s back often faces him when he wakes up in the morning, so that he can pretend, even for just that predawn moment, that she is someone else, that the long slope of her alabaster back dips unknowingly into regions he can only imagine; whosoever has never been to his neighbor’s wife; whosoever has never been in his neighbor’s wife; whosoever has volunteered to wheel the trash can and the recycling bin down to the end of the driveway just so he can look through the window above the sink of his neighbor’s house down the hill at the base of their cul-de-sac where she always washes dishes after dinner while her husband walks around in the background just oblivious; whosoever has, on a whim once, driven into her carport and pretended that he lived there and even got out of his car to meet her at the front door and when she, of course, opened her own door to see who was standing there, came up with the excuse that he was missing some mail and wondered whether it might have been mixed up with hers and did he think she could check, and then while watching her pillage through her handbag thinks in just that moment that he’d make himself as small as possible to fit into a place she visited often: He’d live in the back of her mailbox anxious for her fingers to graze him as she reached for bills and catalogues; he’d crouch into a ball at the bottom of her purse, sitting on the plank of a nail file balanced precariously on the edge of her key ring and a pack of tissues; he’d shrink into something so small that he could live on one of her eyelashes, then move up and down with each closing of her eyes, each impossible wink; whosoever has imagined cradling her short-pixie-shorn head in the palm of his hand, gently guiding her down to his cock from which she’d enthusiastically receive whatever avalanche of gifts she’d be able to coax out of him, grateful and ecstatic to receive his bodily fluids as if they had curative, magical powers; whosoever has made love to his own wife yet actively imagined she was someone else, even going so far as to cover her face with his wide palms as she tossed and whipped her large mane of brown hair against his chest as she rode him with her knees pulled into a clench, like on a ride in an amusement park too tightly secured; whosoever has licked his lips at the sight of his neighbor’s wife at a cocktail party, in that bombastic, eager way he has with that face
he has that reads “devoted,” “stable,” “safe” (his mother would say “a catch,” but then whose mother doesn’t say that?), who has fixed her a drink at the makeshift bar set up in the living room, taking just shy of too much time to clink one ice cube after another with silver clawed tongs into one of the gold-leafed crystal goblets someone thought were impressive enough for this crowd, who then poured mostly gin with her tonic and squeezed her lime in such a way that both of them were momentarily blinded by two escaped pistons of lime juice and who then laughed at the sitcom hilarity of it all while watching each other through now-squinty eyes (for, of course, whosoever covets thy neighbor’s wife must also imagine that she covets him, if only for that moment when they both share a laugh and a lime-clouded look); whosoever has treated every problem he has with his wife as a non-issue in the alternate universe where he’s fucking his neighbor’s wife, who looks at a sagging roof in a thirty-year-old house or the dramatic slope of a broken gutter as things his wife has cooked up simply to annoy him, to occupy his time, whose two children are preternaturally astute and fluent in exotic languages that he cannot speak such as Mandarin Chinese or Latin, languages to which his exceptionally intelligent wife is already well attuned and can therefore carry on conversations with them so he can sometimes walk into his own kitchen in his own house in the United States of America and feel like he’s stepped into a Chinese noodle shop off a noxious alleyway in Hong Kong, underage whores dispersing like rats from the screened-in backdoor, whose wife’s propensity to forget to shave her legs, occasionally rubbing up against him in the middle of the night makes him want to vomit, reminding him of cheap vacations where he had to sleep in a bed with his father while his mother and sister slept in another bed across the motel room; whosoever has imagined choking his wife just so all the languages she knows might spill out of her mouth, word after unrecognizable word, like dead black eels found in waterlogged corpses at the bottoms of drained creeks and lakes; whosoever has followed his neighbor’s wife down an aisle of the Safeway, his own cart temporarily parked out of sight, past the fresh produce section with the fine mists of the sprinklers dowsing the leafy cabbage and long, tan turnips like a vineyard at a winery he once visited in Sonoma with his wife after they were first married, who picks up a bottle of mangoes swimming in viscous syrup with which he can imagine himself poised above her, dripping juices off the edge of the flaccid mango slice, pooling in the crater of her belly button before he sucks it right out, who dreams of taking her into the chilly trough of cellophane-wrapped packages of ground beef and tenderloins and coiled turkey-sausage links and fucking her in it, fucking her right in the meat bin so their thrashing limbs puncture the packages as the meat escapes, wrapping itself around her legs, stringy bits of ground turkey curling themselves around her ankles like sea creatures, a goddess lying breathless in carnage; whosoever cheats on his wife every day in his mind, as if she is a burden, a disappointment to him sexually, a serial boner-killer, who could very well be carrying on her own mental affair, with one of her students even—that boy she employs as a teaching assistant or that one girl in her class she refers to as “the Nadine Gordimer girl” (his wife described herself to him once as “sexually fluid” and has admitted to having had affairs with several women during graduate school before they met); whosoever secretly hopes that she feels these things for other people so he may justify his own silent, daily longings; whosever feeds on these silent, daily longings, who subsists on the fantasies like a prisoner subsists on his sweet, rationed bread, who is actually held at bay by his desires, propped up by them, able to be a good husband, to be a good father by the very existence of his secret interior life, whose wife is physically saved from domestic violence or marital rape by virtue of the fact that he imagines his neighbor’s wife is inside his own wife and therefore cannot be beaten or violated; whosoever finds himself coming home from work and, seeing his neighbor’s wife once again in the window of her den straightening a pile of magazines on a low glass coffee table, just as she might’ve done if the two of them had been preparing the house for a party, or getting it ready to bring home their baby or selling it and moving away together, leaving behind his professorial wife and his children; whosoever sees her and thinks, What if she were mine? He shall never stray.
Read by Strangers Page 9
