“Did you buy this for him?” she asked as David moved to sit next to her. The futon creaked dangerously.
“Yes, when he got his first apartment,” David said. “Man, this place is so nostalgic. Am I the only one who feels twenty-two again?” She smiled but didn’t answer. His hand began to roam and she whispered, “This just seems wrong. Wrong,” but she didn’t stop him.
“Nice of you to wear a skirt,” he said, as he moved his hand higher until he reached the v of the small band of silky fabric. He took his time. They weren’t going anywhere, and he didn’t need anything—just to remember being young and alone with a girl he liked. He had forgotten the pleasure of this near-voyeurism. Kate’s breathing quickened without him even disturbing the elastic, and then she let him continue, but just for a moment before she took his hand away. She opened her eyes and looked at him quizzically, but he said, “No, I’m good—that was a freebie.”
She smiled. “You are so not twenty-two.”
PART III
ORDINARY TIME
Kate and Jane sat on Jane’s couch, a barely touched bottle of wine in front of them. The trial month Jane had signed on for had elapsed and then a second and a third, with the weeks now split into four days Kate and three days Jane. “That’s all I want right now,” Jane insisted, surprised that she meant it, but she was falling behind in everything. Time with David often still felt like a very long date. He displaced her regular life, like a teenaged love affair.
Waiting for a 30 Rock rerun, they had the volume turned low on the unwanted show that came before. Kate counted out cashews four at a time and ate them, each time claiming they were her last. Something on the screen caught her attention, and she mimicked the just audible, disembodied male voice talking over the mute thirty-year-old L’Oreal model: “See up to ten years disappear in a stroke!” Kate repeated. “They think we’re that stupid.”
“Do you buy that stuff? Do you do all that?”
“I barely wash my face. Though if I’m around and aware these next ten years, I could see myself getting more interested.”
The two women looked at their shoes, scattered on the floor.
“What’s the highest heel you ever wear?” Kate asked.
“Probably two inches. I tried spikes a few times, but I always felt like a prostitute. Plus, I fell off them once. A clumsy prostitute.” Jane stood and balanced on her toes. “I don’t get it. Wanting to be looked at that much. In college, once, I was waiting at a bus stop near school.” She had never told anyone this story.
“You remember those days—most of us didn’t have cars. The bus stop was next to a long light and I saw the driver of the first car staring at me. I mean he stripped me. I’d been looked at before, of course, but never anything like this. The light went on and on, and he started making these movements with his mouth. I turned away but that almost seemed worse. After this interminable time with him all over me, the light changed and he pulled away, really, really slowly, and someone from school who’d been just a few feet away, not a guy I knew, came over and said, very sympathetically, that he couldn’t believe how the guy had looked at me. He was being sweet, and he was extremely shocked, but it embarrassed me even more that there had been a witness. As if it had been my fault. I know you know what I mean. Later, though, I was kind of glad he saw it, and I wondered a few times what he did with what he learned.”
“Did you ever wish he’d said something to the driver?”
The question surprised Jane, and then she felt surprise at her surprise. “No, I never thought about anyone helping. For that matter, why didn’t I say something?
“Yes, why don’t nineteen-year-olds know exactly what to do?” Kate glanced at the TV and back at Jane. “David says you don’t confide much.”
Jane watched the start of the next ad while she considered this. “I think I got out of the habit because Charlie didn’t. He was probably afraid he’d divulge something incriminating, so we kept it pretty superficial. And Lucy tells Tom too much, so I have to be careful there.”
“How come you can talk to me then?”
“How can I not trust you? You don’t seem to want anything from me, except that I not cause your husband pain. Where else would I find such a friend?”
“I know that joke! It’s a lovely therapist joke.”
Jane’s voice turned solemn. “I was very good at being single and at having casual relationships, and occasionally even casual sex, and at being alone in between the…casualties, because it seems to me that a woman has to be skilled at being on her own. The quality of available men—well, the good ones are always married—” She stopped, stricken, to wait for Kate’s reaction.
Kate waved her hand. “Don’t give it a thought. The whole time I’ve been with David, I have never—underline never—met an unattached man I thought I could be interested in. Every crush or fantasy I ever had was about someone who was married, or the equivalent.”
They both let these words sink in.
“I don’t want to be alone again,” Jane said.
“I don’t think that will happen,” Kate said.
“I know we have no idea how long this will last,” Jane said quickly. “I’m not a rose-colored-glasses kind of person. Any one of us could find things to object to. Even David.”
Kate raised her eyebrows.
“I know that’s a little hard to picture,” Jane continued, “but still. And then there’s me. Every time I’m in a relationship, men start coming around. Plus, maybe it sounds predatory, but it’s just a fact that before too long, men our age will start being widowed.”
“Breast cancer,” Kate said solemnly.
Jane nodded. They each knew several women in the midst of, or just past, their treatment. “Well, here’s to the impermanence of the unknown,” she said as she raised her glass, but Kate didn’t raise her glass. She was looking at Jane with a question.
Jane replayed her words and realized how she had sounded. “I don’t mean that I’m using David as a stopgap until I meet someone else. I know it must have sounded that way, but he’s not just anyone to me.”
Kate still didn’t speak.
She would have been a good therapist, Jane decided. “But it’s true that if I meet someone else, I’d be out of your hair, right? I mean, I am the third party here.”
Kate sat up straighter and leaned forward. “I’m the third party too. And I could get sick again and be out of your hair. But I don’t think this will work if we each think that way. I want you to tell me: Have I made you feel like you’re not as…weighty as either of us?”
“Christ, no. You’ve been totally generous.”
“He’s not mine to give,” Kate said.
That was a new thought for Jane, and one she would need to think more about later. “I know three things,” Jane said firmly. “I am not hoping to meet someone else. I am not waiting for you to get sick. And we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.”
Kate laughed and they took a ceremonial sip. She pushed the cashews out of reach and Jane turned up the volume for the start of their show. She held onto the remote and hit “rewind” a few times after their laughter made them miss the next quick line. “How can you pause a show that’s being broadcast—one that’s not a recording? Dylan said you could do that, but I didn’t believe it.” Kate looked from the remote to the screen, puzzled.
“I don’t know. You just can.”
“But how do you catch up with yourself—with the start of the next show?”
“I don’t know. I never seem to care about the next show. Ask Dylan maybe.”
“It’s like time travel,” Kate concluded.
“It is, but you can only go backwards and not forwards, sort of like life. You can remember things, but you can’t predict much.”
After watching the episode’s epilogue, Jane turned the TV off. Kate started to gather her things but stopped and, then with a half-smile, said, “What was David like?”
“You’re fishing for compliments.”
Earlier, Jane had almost asked if David knew Kate was here, as if one or both of them was somehow cheating on him. She had stopped herself at the first syllable. It wasn’t her job to manage this thing, or rather she would manage her part of it, and the other two would manage theirs. David must know that Kate being here was a possibility.
“Maybe it’s not fair to ask, but tell me anyway,” Kate said.
“Overwhelmed. Miserable. Funny. Handsome in an exhausted, sad way. I thought he was great from the start. But it wasn’t clear he was at all available.”
“But he was, wasn’t he?”
“I don’t know. I mean it’s hard to be miserable and available simultaneously. I think meeting me took him by surprise. And maybe even if he didn’t think he was ready, he could at least welcome the possibility, when it happened without a round of grim dating.” With a light still glowing on the TV, Jane flicked the remote again. “Okay, a question for you, Kate: If David had—and I mean if—I know it’s not likely, but if he had been unfaithful…before, what do you think you would have done?”
“I would have left him,” Kate said. “He had absolutely no reason to cheat back then, and I would have left.” Then she smiled and said, “Or not. I don’t know. He would have paid—I can say that much.”
Jane found Kate’s certainty, and then her ambivalence, consoling. “Let me ask you something else. What’s in this for you? I don’t mean the three of us—I mean you and me. We seem to have drifted into a friendship.”
One day their carts collided at the grocery store. Then, peering at each other’s food choices as people do if they don’t stop themselves in time, they saw each had the coffee David liked, along with grapefruit juice and green bananas. They smirked and then let themselves laugh, their carts blocking the aisle. They agreed to meet at the cafe just past the checkout and talked for an hour—“I didn’t buy anything frozen, did you?”—and then continued to meet every few weeks to talk, and once for a concert David couldn’t attend, and another time when Jane tried Kate’s yoga class. Kate told David about it from the start, and he said, with a touch of resignation in his voice, “I’m surprised it took you this long.”
Now, in Jane’s living room, Kate answered her question. “I’m lonely, but it has nothing to do with David. I used to have a lot of friends, and now the only one I’m comfortable with is Martha, and sometimes that’s hard too because she knew me when I was well. The friends who stayed away feel guilty, and they don’t believe me when I say I don’t blame them. It’s tiresome. It’s not their staying away that bothers me. It’s what they saw before they stayed away. So we’re embarrassed and awkward for different reasons, and it doesn’t work anymore.”
“Do you feel any of that around the kids?”
“If I thought they were dwelling on how I was then, I’d be horrified. But I think they’ve pushed it out of their minds. They worry about me, but I think the current me is who they see.”
Jane took a gamble. “And David?”
“David, well, that’s harder. I say to myself, ‘He watched you deliver two babies.’ Of course, that inelegance isn’t the same, but still, there’s less room for vanity after pushing out a baby. If I let myself think about being sick, I’m very embarrassed, but I never feel like he remembers me that way or is haunted by that version of me. He’s more worried about reliving it. Me here, but gone again.” She shrugged. “We each need to coexist with our particular demons. But I’ve read my chart. You and I didn’t interact at all. I’m a new person to you. Almost, anyway.” She paused to give Jane a chance to say something, and when she didn’t, Kate finished with, “And we have so much in common, after all.”
“I set you up nicely for that one, didn’t I?” Jane said and picked up her wine glass. “To friendship,” she toasted. “Odd or not.”
Jane came over the next evening—their first time together in the family home—and the three of them sat at the kitchen counter. “No alcohol,” David insisted. “We’d be sure to mess up the scheduling.” Kate had a wall calendar in front of her with invitations and notices paper-clipped neatly to the current month as well as the next few. David was still at Jane’s three days a week. The plan was to eventually go to three days one week and four the next, but all of them thought Kate still didn’t have had enough going on in her life for that.
David and Jane thought consecutive days would be better for them, but when they tried to plan around Jane’s schedule, they realized that on too many occasions he’d be waiting at her house until she came home shortly before bedtime. He didn’t mind doing that once in a while, he had told her the third time it happened. “But it can’t be often. I’d probably feel like you were just using me for sex,” he said, and not entirely to make her laugh. So for now, his one evening class and Kate’s still uncomplicated life meant Jane’s schedule dominated the division of time.
“Are we going to get away with this?” David asked. He hadn’t planned to say it. “I mean, am I really going to get away with this? Without hurting you both? Without punishment?”
“What’s behind all these questions?” Kate said. “Is this guilt talking? I think you know I can’t help you with that any more than I have. Is this just you, David? Waiting for bad things to happen. Or self-consciousness?”
“It’s not guilt. And it’s almost never self-consciousness, though there’s some of that. And why wouldn’t there be?” David had never touched her in front of Jane, but he reached for her hand now and held it between his. “I just worry that it will wear on both of you. That it will feel like rejection instead of choice.”
“You could feel a little rejected too, David,” Jane said. “I mean, here are two people you love who are telling you they can get by with less of you. Maybe that’s what you’re after here. Maybe neither of us fought hard enough to be the one and only.”
David didn’t think he had ever been interested in the kind of fight she described, but it sort of felt like she had him here. “Okay. I couldn’t have attached words to it, but yes, there is, within this amazing state of being wanted, also some not-being-wanted. Some familiar feeling of not being completely necessary. The old parent-thing, I realize. You know how parent-things are. As soon as you think they’re gone, they’re back.” He looked at the ceiling.
Kate touched him once on the shoulder. “You need to trust me,” she said. “I love you with all my heart. It’s true that my heart isn’t exactly like it used to be, but whatever is there is yours.”
Jane leaned forward and waited until he looked at her. “It would be so easy for me to find a man I didn’t want. I’ve found so many of them already. It’s you, David. Yes, it’s complicated, but it’s you, and I don’t think I can do anything about that.”
He was embarrassed. He had thought he was speaking about his fear of hurting them, but instead they had uncovered something in him. It wasn’t significant—more of an artifact, an old feeling attached to something new—but he was reminded that nothing about this venture was predictable. It made him wonder what else lay ahead.
David came home from work and walked through the house, hunting for his reading glasses and, if he were honest about it, looking for and worrying about signs of a possible relapse. Jane or no Jane, losing Kate again was not a tolerable thought. He tried to be strict with himself about not dwelling on it. Self-flagellation didn’t have the appeal it once did. There were, of course, the occasional nightmares, but he didn’t hold himself accountable for those. Some days, the anxiety was so strong he wanted to follow her to see if she was driving in circles or talking oddly to strangers. He knew that even if he had left her for Jane, she’d still be in his life, and everyone he loved would be ruined by the loss of her again. And now, even Jane’s life, he knew, would not go unscathed. It was too late for that.
On his second pass through their office and the kitchen, he had the frightening thought that he was seeing Post-it’s in greater numbers, but when he looked at them closely, he saw that they weren’t references to forks or stove but ins
tead, Xerox last year’s tax return/find flash-drive or check flexible spending account and he smiled, spared. This was just Kate taking care of the numbing details of modern life. From a small pile of bills, he pulled the solicitations from the local and national Alzheimer’s groups. He’d write those checks. She shouldn’t have to do that.
His gratitude didn’t stop him from saying later that evening, “I continue to really dislike how you load the dishwasher.” He made sure to keep his voice pleasant.
“I can’t believe you care about something that small. You have dish-loading OCD.”
“If you don’t care, then why don’t you do it the way I like?” He had never made this point before. He had always backed down, always let it stand that he was the petty one.
“Because I’d have to think about—” She stopped for a second and started again. “Because the issue betrays the fact that you don’t think I’m perfect, and we were always based on the idea that you thought I was perfect.” Her smile was sheepish.
“Perfect for me, Katie. I only meant perfect for me. Not incapable of annoying.”
He watched her move the dirty bowls to where they ought to be.
Dr. Tsang explained the newest phase of the study. “Sadly, this is my last time to be at your appointment. You’ll be followed by Dr. Ratha now that this phase has ended, and there will be only one visit a month. I can tell you that everyone who responded well is still doing well. We were sad to learn that one person had a serious heart incident, but we knew he had pre-existing heart disease. That he survived this time is probably due to the fact that he could communicate his symptoms. At any rate, we’ll break the code in about six months and end this next phase of the study. Of course, you’ll remain on the regimen you’re on now.”
The Half-Life of Everything Page 20