The Half-Life of Everything

by Deborah Carol Gang

  David suddenly felt panicked as Kate prepared to drive away on her own. He wanted to follow her to see how well she drove. He wanted her to go straight home so he could call her in a few minutes to check. Why did she even need to go out? Couldn’t they make a life with her confined to their house or block or neighborhood? Why risk the world again?

  When he did call her just before his afternoon class, she was safe, of course. He wished he believed the of course. When she asked why he called, he hadn’t prepared an excuse and could only say he didn’t know. She wouldn’t enjoy that kind of solicitousness.

  He worried enough that he came home a little early, thinking he would surprise her, but she wasn’t there. It wasn’t long before he heard her pull into the garage and then join him in the kitchen, still flushed from the gym.

  “I didn’t see a single person I knew, or who knew me. This town is bigger than I remember.” She began to look through the cupboards. She reached and stretched, looking for something to make with only three ingredients and one pot, she explained. She pulled out two cake mixes and a can of icing, all five years past their expiration. He could have gone to help her but watched her instead, her body contained in form-fitting black pants and a tapered knit top in a beautiful color he couldn’t have named. “You used to wear baggy clothes for yoga.”

  “They don’t do that anymore.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Are there men in the class?”

  “Today there were four.” She had stopped looking for food. It seemed unlikely either of them was going to cook. She drank a glass of water quickly.

  “I miss you, Kate.”

  “It means a lot to me that you do.”

  “You know that I’m available just about always, right?” Did she blush or was it residual exertion? “And I’m fine with just using your body without regard for your needs.”

  “That’s a good joke. You have never ever done that. Even if I said it was okay.”

  “You’d be surprised.” She had yet to ask for details about the downward arc of their sex life, and he hoped she wouldn’t choose now.

  “Well, we could try that,” she said in a neutral voice.

  He couldn’t read her expression. “Now?” he asked encouragingly.

  “I should take a shower first.”

  “Not for me,” he said

  “It’ll take two minutes. Really.”

  She couldn’t come. “That’s okay. It doesn’t matter to me. Remember, I’m just using you.”

  And paradoxically, as sometimes happens, she relaxed enough to not try, and her body figured things out, quietly and with little fanfare. He finished quickly and they broke apart to lie facing each other.

  “That was a nice surprise,” she said, “but I won’t be able to come again.”

  “You’re about 10,000 ahead of me.”

  “You did the math?”

  “Men are very competitive about sex.”

  They lay quietly. She had the sheet up under her armpits, something he didn’t remember her doing.

  “This is nice,” she said. “But I’m getting up.”

  He joined her at the bathroom sink and they brushed their teeth, eying each other before spitting.

  “Why are we brushing our teeth?” he asked. “I’m very hungry.”

  To his mirror image, Kate said, “I called for dinner before I showered, and the food will be here soon, and I don’t know why I’m brushing my teeth. What a waste.” She rinsed. “Did you know some couples won’t buy a house unless the master bath has two sinks? And to think, we don’t even have a master bath.”

  “You must have seen that on HGTV.”

  “You’ve heard of HGTV?”

  “Treadmill at the gym.”

  “I’ve watched it at home a couple of times. I wouldn’t tell just anybody that.” She put her finger to her lips to hold him to secrecy.

  “You need a job,” David said, and then realized it was true, or would be soon.

  We’re all doing fine, David told himself. He was working and writing, and Kate seemed less shell-shocked each day. They heard from the boys much more often than when he was on his own or when he was with Jane and, as Kate joked, that made it all almost worth it. When he wanted to cause himself pain, he would imagine Jane going out with younger and richer men. Or any man. He would imagine someone touching her. He drank more on those evenings. Sometimes he thought he saw her or her car, but it was always one of those lovelorn tricks of the brain, so it took a long second to trust his senses when she turned out to be two people ahead of him in line at the coffee place. He never went there at night, but they were out of coffee for the morning. Kate hadn’t wanted to come with him.

  He stepped out of line so that Jane would see him as she moved away from the counter. He watched her finally realize it was him. She must have been so sure this hour of night was a safe way to avoid this possibility.

  They stood facing each other. “I’m going to leave,” she said. Her voice trembled. “It’s not that it isn’t good to see you.” She said this nicely. “But I’m going to leave.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I understand. Nothing’s changed, but I understand.” He held the door for her.

  He forced himself to get back in line, though his mind was on such high alert that morning coffee now seemed superfluous. He wondered where she was going at this hour carrying two coffees. When he was two-thirds of the way home, his cell lit up. He saw her name, or at least thought he did, and pulled into a Walgreen’s and parked.

  “It’s you,” David said. “How are you?”

  “How’s Kate is more to the point.” Jane couldn’t quite believe she had called him. She’d helped enough therapy clients with strategies for not making these kinds of calls.

  “Well, there are a lot of valid questions here,” he said.

  “I thought…” He could hardly hear her and turned up the volume. “I thought I was good until I saw you.”

  He took in an audible breath but didn’t speak. He hoped she’d say something more. When the silence went past what he could tolerate, he said, “I know you’ll have a good life without me. A better life. There’s no way I can pretend to make a case for you and me.”

  “Look, are you sure you want all these complications? Kate is great. I mean, I believed you before, but still, meeting her, it seems like a pretty full life.” She had called him in some kind of trance state and with no agenda. Or maybe she wanted him to retract the offer. Maybe she hoped he would say or do something that would free her.

  “How are you?” he asked again.

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m in trouble. I’m afraid I’m in real trouble.”

  “Are you sorry you met me?”

  It was a question she had considered many times and she told him the truth: She tried to imagine they had never met, but it turned out she couldn’t allow any scenario in which she didn’t meet him and love him. “It would be so easy if I were sorry.”

  Silence. He was afraid to say anything in case he stepped on her next words. He was afraid anything he could say would sound like begging.

  “One month,” she said. “We’ll try one month. I have no idea if this will work. Will it be enough? Will it be a continual frustration? I will not live in Jealousy Land again. That much I know.” Need seems to follow love, she thought. Women start out so independent, but soon they’re waiting for the phone call.

  ‘One month,” he repeated.

  “If it hurts Kate, it stops,” she said. “And no one else knows except people we can’t stand to lie to.”

  “I can lie for you,” he said. “If I have to.”

  “I ran into Jane,” he told Kate. He had thought of only saying that Jane had called, because to call after the accidental meeting would seem too spontaneous, too unplanned—not to be trusted. But instead he told her exactly as it had happened. “One month,” he quoted. “And not if it hurts you.”

  “I thought you looked different when you came in the door,” Kate said.

  He
hated to think he was so transparent, though he didn’t think he was, except to her.

  “She must have tried so hard not to contact you,” Kate went on. “There’s not even the small comfort of calling and hanging up like in the old days. You can’t hide anything now.”

  He hadn’t tried to picture that. He had imagined Jane moving on to a new life with someone who wasn’t him. He also couldn’t imagine what to say next, so he said, “Okay, Katie, here we go,” and she seemed to think that was fine.

  A few days later, David left work and drove the other direction from home. He knocked and waited and then used his key to let himself in the side door. When he called out, Jane came to meet him, carrying the mail and newspaper. “I used my key,” he told her. “I hope that was okay.”

  “You’re right. I need rules. You’re not a husband. You’re not a friend exactly. Lucy would knock and wait before she used her key. What are you?”

  He was glad to see her take his question seriously.

  “I think that if I know that you’re coming,” she said, “then you can use your key, but if you’re not expected, then you should knock.”

  “And wait? And leave if you’re not home?”

  She nodded, pleased to have a policy. “I’m glad you’re here, though—for many reasons—but first, could you look at the tub drain? How could it work one day but not the next?”

  They went to a big box store to buy a replacement, along with a new splashguard for the garbage disposal. Lucy’s oldest child had somehow sent the current rubber circle into the works of the thing, and then turned it on. While Jane was off looking for something, a neighbor came up to David to say he’d heard the good news about Kate. Just then, Jane joined them, tile cleaner in hand, and the neighbor, looking studiously polite, backed away quickly, calling out nice to meet you as he left. “I don’t think he thinks I’m the housekeeper,” Jane said.

  She didn’t seem to care who the neighbor thought she was. He was embarrassed, but that seemed a small price to pay.

  Installing the splashguard went quickly, but then David spent enough time with the tub stopper to know she needed a plumber. “Really, I’m mostly good at remembering historical events,” he told her. They made dinner and ate in the kitchen, ignoring the landline that rang several times. “I’m sure it’s just Rachel from Cardholder Services,” Jane said. “She’s stalking me.”

  “I know her well,” David laughed. “She’s such a bitch. That touch of menace in her voice—the veiled threats. This is your last chance.”

  “She can’t help it. She’s programmed that way.”

  After dinner, they moved to the living room, and Jane turned to the presentation she was giving the next day on the placebo effect. “I need to go through everything twice more. I just need forty minutes and then I’m all yours.”

  “I’ll bet you’re letter-perfect already.”

  “Yes, but I never stop there.”

  A few feet away from her, David pretended to read but, after fifteen minutes, she put her files down and said, “This is ridiculous. I can hear your thoughts. Let’s go to bed. I’ll just get up a little early tomorrow.”

  “Bed?” he said. “When we’ve got a perfectly good floor right here?”

  “Do not push your luck,” she said, and she began to turn out lights.

  Later, after she cried out and then caught her breath, she pushed him a few inches away from her so she could see his face.

  “What?”

  “I still can’t believe you’re here,” she said.

  She wasn’t the only one.

  At home, the family scattered, Kate to take a nap, David to work in the study that they once again shared, and Dylan and Jack to the driveway to play basketball, the net gray and tattered but still usable. David listened to the sound of the ball and hoped their elderly neighbor to the west wasn’t home. She had let them know years before that the marathon games annoyed her; now, however, she was kind of deaf. For him, the sound was welcome; it carried the message home safe, home safe. Once, he had surprised Kate by asking if she heard the same reassurance, but she had never thought of it, and like their neighbor, had to work at not being irritated by the sound. “Though I do like it when they’re home,” she said, looking at him oddly. She and David had been pleased to the point of silliness when Jack called the day before to announce he and Dylan were on their way.

  “It’s a surprise, but we wanted to warn you so you could go buy better food or whatever you do before we come home.”

  David finished his goal of grading ten essays, most of them good, and found the boys in the living room, sitting near a properly made fire and stripped to their tee shirts because it wasn’t very cold out. While he and Kate had been unavailable, the cats had bravely come out of hiding and were sniffing the boys’ feet, then hiding again before pouncing. Anova climbed Dylan’s chest and positioned herself precariously on his shoulder. Fred tried to bat her off. “I had no idea cats were so…” Jack searched for the right word and ended with, “cute.”

  “Then you are not spending enough time on the internet,” Dylan told him. “And you’re not following those links Mom sent you—the cat break-dancing in the mirror, the mother cat hugging her baby.”

  Jack looked guilty. “It doesn’t take long to take someone for granted, does it?”

  Dylan frowned. “It doesn’t. But maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe it means we’re optimistic.”

  “Either that or naive,” Jack countered.

  Kate came in the room carrying the three most recent photo albums and a glass of water.

  “I couldn’t nap, but I had a lovely time looking at these. Now we have to go through them together.”

  David could tell she’d been crying, but he didn’t know if Dylan and Jack would notice the signs, which she had tried to cover up with eye makeup. She sat in a chair they had saved for her and put the albums on a side table. She changed the order of the pile and then lined the books up carefully before she looked up to speak.

  “Boys, we need to talk about some changes.” They both sat up straight, Jack rigid, as if ready to fight.

  “I think you know that for your dad, meeting Jane wasn’t some casual event. He and she love each other, and they had every reason to believe that I wouldn’t get better. And if I have a recurrence, the doctors can only guess how to treat it.”

  She took a sip from her water glass. “I think of myself as having died,” she said. “There was this dead person sitting, walking, staring. It wasn’t really me.”

  “You’re getting a divorce?” Dylan said, his voice equal parts surprised and baffled.

  “No one is getting a divorce,” David said. “You don’t even need to think about that.”

  Jack said to Kate, “Are you going somewhere?” sounding like the fifteen-year-old she had left once before.

  In first grade, Jack had discovered divorce: “Does everyone have to get divorced? How long does a divorce last? Do you know when you’ll get divorced?”

  “No. No one’s going anywhere. I’m trying to be brave enough to tell you that we think there’s a way that Jane and Dad don’t have to be so hurt and sad and—”

  “You’re going all Utah on us,” Jack said, getting it before Dylan did. “That is so bent.” Jack’s voice was shaking. “This is so stupid. So unnecessary. So embarrassing.”

  “Yes, it may be all those things, and I don’t expect you to give us your blessings. We just don’t want to hide and lie.”

  “There’s just no way?” Dylan said. “No way to go back to how things were? To fix this thing? Dad…?” The last word plaintive and childlike.

  “This might be a way to fix it, is what we’re hoping,” David said.

  “Fix it for you!” Jack shouted. “What about Mom?”

  He began to cry silently, and Kate moved to squeeze in next to him. She put her arm around his shoulders, and he made a gesture to shrug her off, but she held him tighter and he let her. He stopped crying and pulled up his tee sh
irt to wipe his face.

  “We think Jane is with the program,” Kate said, “though understandably, she might not think this is entirely fair to her.”

  “Well, Mom, you might not think it’s all that fair either,” Dylan said.

  “It’s what I want. I can’t be everything to your dad anymore. I cannot live day after day picturing him alone again if I get sick. You need to know that Dad would give Jane up for me—he did give her up. I’ve met Jane and I plan to like her. I think she might already like me quite a bit.” She used her thumb to blot a tear on Jack’s cheek. “This will work, honey. We’re into the second month. It will work, and there won’t be a trail of broken hearts.”

  David wondered if the more likely outcome was that there would be three or more hearts broken in new and confusing ways. He let Kate’s story stand: that he had given up Jane—when really Jane gave him up, and so quickly that he was hardly tested. Would he have been ready to lie and cheat if Jane let him? But she wouldn’t, and he had stayed home to love Kate, which was not at all hard, while he waited for the attrition of Jane and for the wanting to become less demanding. Eventually, he knew, it would have become difficult to conjure Jane’s face, and he would betray Kate only by occasional dreams that were wanted and unwanted in exactly equal parts. The other possible scenario? If Jane had been willing to cheat? This was not the moment for rigorous truth-telling.

  “Okay, so I think we all know that this thing is not going to work,” Dylan said, “but in the meantime, how is it going to work? Do you draw a number every day? Is there a rotation?” He looked somewhere past Kate’s head as he spoke. “And what does Mom do while you’re gone? Wait? Think?”

  “Imagine things?” Jack said.

  “So,” David began. “Two days a week at first. At the most. When Mom’s settled in and busier, then we’ll look at weekends, holidays, all that.”