I met Dov’s chocolate-y eyes. “Anytime Dov, okay? Or maybe when Josh goes to work. You know.” I turned and smooched Josh, ignoring the slight narrowing of Dov’s eyes, not so friendly anymore.
Back in the present, I shook my head to clear it. Enough of these ancient memories. It was all in the past, a silly fantasy world, a month of dreams turned to dust, so long ago.
Chapter 8
But I couldn’t help myself. Right after dropping Lucy off at preschool the next morning, I rushed to a bookstore. Thank goodness Barnes & Noble at the Grove shopping center opened at 9 am. I couldn’t believe Josh had written a bestseller, and I hadn’t even noticed. Geez, there was even a whole publisher’s display at the entrance to the children’s section. I’d probably walked past that bright red cardboard display half a dozen times, heading in there with Lucy to kill half an hour while she dismantled sticker books, and I had to pay for them.
I picked it up, curious. Weighed it in my hand. It was a little heavier than a few sticks of dynamite. Recklessly, I flipped it right open to the inside back cover. Might as well get it over with first thing. Yes—there he was, in full color. Staring right at me, his head tilted to one side, eyes squinting a little. He was so beautiful. I glanced at the biography paragraph quickly, but it didn’t really register: all that mattered was seeing his face.
I needed to read this book, right now. Touch, through writing, the most intimate part of Josh I could. Toting my purchase in its crinkly green bag, I strode, fast, to the nearby Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, recklessly purchased a large Chai Tea Ice Blended, and sat on one of the little benches inside the door—there was no room for tables in the tiny shop. I had three hours till I needed to pick up Lucy. Plenty of time.
It was like Harry Potter, mixed with superheroes—two concepts that your average ten year old would find irresistible. It was a tale of a school for super heroes (“supers,” they called themselves)—a place where kids with freakish abilities were sent to be among their own kind, where they learned to harness their powers and defeat evil. They lived in high-rise-style dormitories, with two sets of elevators, one leading to the girls’ area, one to the boys’. Downstairs was a warren of classrooms, auditoriums, and a dining hall. Many high-jinks ensued—elevators caused to go sideways instead of up and down; teachers stranded in the space-time continuum in retaliation for providing too much homework; entire meals turned to gelatin by the force of one unfortunate superhero’s sole power. Due to the destructive nature of the supers’ abilities, the entire building had to be completely flame-proof, invisibility-proof, explosion-proof, and drown-proof.
The young supers were properly angst-ridden about being estranged from their families, being born freaks and all. They resented being forced to learn fiendishly complicated ways to control their own minds and hence, their recalcitrant bodies. The plot thickened when a group of thirteen-year-olds discovered a competing nearby school, a place unknown to anyone, and in fact cloaked by invisibility. In this secret spot, renegade supers were being trained to become dark anti-heroes with a view to gaining control of the world. The supers would have to band together, contrary to the orders of their fuddy-duddy teachers, who refused to believe there was a dark plot afoot. The fate of the world rested in their hands. Oh, it was such fun. Thrilling, humorous, deft. It was, surprisingly enough, the book Josh was meant to write.
It was Monday. Five days till Saturday, at 2 pm, when I would manage to get back to that very Barnes & Noble, via some excuse. I had to see him.
~ ~ ~
Don’t think I hadn’t Googled Josh before now. When our relationship had ended, I’d put him away in a compartment in my mind, but that didn’t mean I’d forgotten him. He was always there, and I fantasized every so often that we’d meet again somehow, in some improbable situation—perhaps as senior citizens, on board a cruise ship, forty years hence. Our eyes would catch each others’ near the railing as we hobbled by, propped on our respective canes. We’d reminisce distantly about our youth, carefully sidestepping any mention that we’d once been in love. In other words: I was so disheartened I couldn’t even have decent reunion fantasies.
The thing was, he never showed up in my searches. A search several years ago for “Joshua Barnes” turned up an English scholar on Wikipedia (how appropriate!), the Facebook page of a pimply 17-year-old Wisconsin high school student, and a LinkedIn bio for a Unix administrator in Illinois. My Josh didn’t seem to exist, anywhere in the universe as indexed by Google. Maybe I’d made him up. A few botched photographs and email printouts constituted my only proof that he was real.
The problem was, real or not, I had never stopped loving him. I was convinced: you only get one soulmate, in this life. I had been fortunate to meet mine, as so many others hadn’t. And, even more amazing, I could have another chance. I could see him, at least, and remember.
By the time I picked up Lucy from preschool, I’d made it about a third of the way through Supers, and had craftily concealed it at the far back of my pajama drawer. I was still figuring out how I’d manage to sneak off to Josh’s book signing, but I had a more pressing plan for the next day: find out everything I could about Josh. Walking from the parking lot, through the security gates, and into the hallway to wait for Ms. Marcie to open the classroom door, signaling that school was over for the day, I only distantly noticed the other parents. The interlocking linoleum tiles on the floor caught my interest more than Christine and Jennifer. They were co-room parents for Ms. Marcie’s class. As from the bottom of a well, I heard them animatedly discussing plans for the class Easter party on Friday. Who would buy what. Sign-up sheets. Cupcakes. Plastic eggs. Other waiting parents chimed in. Nick, the cool stay-at-home dad, would make balloon animals. Jennifer wondered if frosted cupcakes would have too much refined sugar. Marjorie, the earthy-crunchy mom, suggested carrot sticks with dip, instead. I shook my head, irritated. They might as well be on Mars. For the love of god: who cared?
I was busy. In the tiles I could imagine whole worlds, each square another scene in the half-formed life I’d begun envisioning with me and Josh, together again. In one tile: our reunion. In the next: passionate lovemaking. Another tile had us dining leisurely at a romantic restaurant, gazing dreamily into each others’ eyes as we had so long ago. Conveniently, Lucy and George didn’t exist in these fantasies. I wasn’t sure whether they existed at all. Those squares were so compelling, they had the power to obliterate everyday life.
I realized with a start that the classroom door had been open for a few minutes now, and parents were filing out with their respective offspring, holding them by the hand, sometimes dragging them, juggling lunch boxes, art projects, and siblings in strollers. I hurried in to find Lucy, happily paging through one of those thick cardboard books featuring farm animals. “What noise does the duck make?” I asked, automatically. “Quack, quack!” squealed Lucy promptly. “Hey, guess what Mommy? We made bunnies today. It’s spring time! It’s Easter, coming up! Can we have an egg hunt?”
“Of course, honey. Just like we did last year. We’ll have an egg hunt in the front yard.” All the while, I was bundling her into her jacket, and grabbing her lunch, and holding the artwork away from me with two fingers—the Elmer’s glue was still damp. The bunny had several too many googly eyes—Lucy loved those things and would stick them everywhere.
“So tell me about your day,” I continued, shepherding her to the car. It was amazing that I was even able to speak. My mind was still a million miles away. But my daily life was so routine, I could live it even sleepwalking. Lucy began with the day’s highlight: “And Mark wouldn’t share the trike, and he kept hogging it up, until then, guess what, he fell off! ’Cause he was going too fast. And so he scraped his knee, and it was bleeding, and he cried so much! So Abigail called him a crybaby, and then he got so mad, Mommy, you wouldn’t believe it, he hit Ms. Marcie! He smacked her leg! And so then Ms. Marcie made him go to Mrs. Colfax’s office . . .” Lucy’s tale continued as I buckled her into her car seat, its
cow print now permanently stained by milk and juice spills. I only had to nod, and laugh, and ask a few questions—“So what was your favorite part about making the bunny?” to get us safely home.
We read a library book about magic tap shoes, so insipid I couldn’t remember what I was reading even while reading it, and I got her ready for her nap. The only thing she would wear at nap time was a nightie she’d had since she was two—it didn’t even cover her underwear anymore. So long as she slept, she could wear a gold lamé tutu for all I cared. Nap time was my most precious time of the day—a god-given hour and a half when Lucy was there, but I needn’t be constantly aware of her.
I eagerly fished Supers out from the back of the p.j. drawer and recommenced reading. The more I read, the farther I sunk into an abyss I had no wish to claw my way out of. I remembered the power his words had had over me—a power long-forgotten, shoved away. Back, now. The sensuous way he shaped sentences, the way his punctuation was so exact yet unexpected. He could make love to me, just with words, in a book for children. The more I read, the more aroused I got, until, my face burning, I had to shove the book away. What kind of sicko gets off on G-rated young adult fiction?
I could fill up the rest of nap time, no problem: a film reel of Josh’s Greatest Hits started playing constantly in my head. It had been ten years, so of necessity the edges were fuzzy and the figures rather indistinct. Now that I had memorized Josh’s crisp author photo, though, I could mentally Photoshop his face onto the blurred body. Oh, look, this was a good scene: us, smooching in Hampstead Heath on the day after we’d met. In fact, I could replay that entire day constantly in my head—the dizzy anticipation, the desire, the day that never ended. The day I fell in love for the first time.
I heard a wail from the next room. It was one of Lucy’s peculiarities that she always awoke—in the morning and from her naps—crying. As if reality was a horrifying substitute for a loose, lovely dream world she didn’t want to leave.
That afternoon, Lucy and I would keep busy, like always. We’d have snack time, and story time, and coloring time. Maybe we’d drive to the Fairfax branch library and get our allotted ten children’s books. All marking time till tomorrow, when I’d begin researching the next phase of my life, in earnest.
In the meantime, I set her up in front of the easel I kept in the corner of the living room. It had been standing there forlorn, waiting for some inspiration that never came, for several years. It was Lucy’s now: I’d clamped a big newsprint pad to it, and I loved to watch her draw. She drew with so much energy and conviction—without self-editing or criticism of any kind. She knew exactly what she wanted to create, and with her fist closed vise-like around the fat Crayola washable marker, she created her own worlds of stick ballerinas, enormous faces with googly bug eyes, and exuberant dashed-off squiggles. She reminded me of myself as an eight or nine year old, enclosed in my upstairs room, with whole free weekend afternoons available to draw, draw, draw. I’d scarf scratch-paper pads from downstairs, or empty ruled accounting ledgers—whatever I could find—and sit there for hours with colored pencils, drawing fairy-mermaid hybrids and outrageous fashion designs. I’d get so tired by the end of the afternoon, after dozens of sketches, but I’d keep on, hoping for the revelation and excitement that maybe the next one, or the next, might provide. As if I kept drawing I could transport myself inside the paper itself, into a universe created and imagined wholly by me. As if I could have that kind of power.
“Mommy, look!” Lucy had haphazardly torn her latest piece from the pad, leaving a long trailing vee of newsprint in her wake. “It’s a picture of you. It’s from me!”
I looked like a demented alien, with eyes askew, one enormous, one tiny. Corkscrews of hair spiraled defiantly from my saucer-shaped head. “Honey, it’s beautiful.” I gave her a huge hug. “I’ll treasure it forever.”
~ ~ ~
I worried while preparing dinner how I’d even be able to look George in the eye when he came home, my head so full of obscene lovemaking fantasies I couldn’t even properly measure out the pasta, and ended up making enough for three nights’ worth. Just like that, in one day my entire view of George had changed. It was like holding a piece of wrinkled wax paper in front of my face. Without the wax paper, everything was crystal clear and super simple. I was a nice, boring person married to a solid, tenured statistics professor. We had a lovely daughter and lived in a rent-controlled apartment in a desirable location in Los Angeles. I had a comfortable life, an understanding husband, and mornings of freedom to do whatever I chose. Pretty awesome.
But raise the wax paper and everything assumed distorted, blurry proportions. That pleasant-seeming tenured professor was a warden holding me prisoner in a life that wasn’t anything I wanted or understood. The little apartment forced me to spend insufferable amounts of time with my nearby mother-in-law, and I walked through my days like a zombie. I lived the life many would envy, but it wasn’t the life I wanted. I had thought I loved George yesterday, but today what I felt seemed a self-serving sham. I’d married him so I wouldn’t have to be Vivian any longer. I could be his pet, his conquest, anything so I wouldn’t have to keep trying, and looking, and wanting things I couldn’t have.
Lucy was the only thing I’d ever wanted that I’d gotten to keep. Even though she kept me trembling daily on the verge of exhaustion, I still loved her more than anything. No imaginary waxed paper goggles would change my love for her.
But twenty-four hours was all it took to distort how I felt about George into something unrecognizable. I couldn’t face him. He’d immediately see the awful truth—that I was still in love with Mr. Fantasy Man I’d known for a few weeks ten years ago, and all I wanted to do was make hot, passionate love with him and decorate his body with chocolate-based paints.
Fortunately, routine was so ingrained for us now that George didn’t even notice anything amiss. He came home in time for dinner, for once. Lucy was over the moon at having dinner with her daddy, and he kept his attention focused on her. And I’d ended up making an effort on the meal—I’d tossed the linguine with shrimp and lemon, an uncharacteristic departure from my usual “if it takes more than five minutes to prepare, it isn’t worth it” attitude. Mealtime was so hectic, George and I weren’t even able to speak, doing triage instead while shoveling food in our mouths as fast as possible. Lucy was pretty much draped head to foot in plastic—bib, chair cover, floor cover—in a futile attempt to stop food from migrating from her plate throughout the house. There was an incident with a spilled cup of milk, and a lot of crying about strawberries instead of grapes for dessert—“Mommy, strawberries was my favorite last week. So I’m not eating strawberries anymore. I don’t want them! Get them off my plate! I want grapes now!”
So, our only chance to talk didn’t happen until Lucy was asleep, after eight p.m. George took over the bulk of the bedtime routine—bath, story, hugs and kisses. I only had to make an appearance at the end, to give Lucy a last kiss. “Daddy, hold my hand till I fall asleep,” she murmured sleepily, and he did. He was such a good dad. He’d do anything for Lucy, as he would for me.
How could I even think about Josh when here was my my future, right in front of me? My difficult, beautiful Lucy, and my steady, unwavering husband. “Tough day?” he asked sympathetically, emerging from Lucy’s room, exhausted himself after a full day of teaching, traffic, and three-year-old. He peered with concern at my drooping eyes, red-rimmed from constant internal viewing of the Vivian-and-Josh porno. “Not so bad,” I had to answer. And that was the extent of the evening’s conversation. I excused myself to bed, incredibly early, to continue my fantasizing in private. Imagining Josh, I couldn’t think about George. How could I not see Josh? And how could I see him, realizing I still loved him, and betray George so despicably and thoroughly?
~ ~ ~
I’d felt ill all the time since Sunday—my stomach aching and head pounding—but also intensely alert, deliriously happy for no reason. Since reading that Book Review secti
on, a constant song was running through my head. It went, “Josh is back! Josh is back!” all the time, and in I Love Lucy style, I’d find myself whirling thrilled through the kitchen, singing at the top of my lungs as I cleaned the bathroom.
Eating seemed unnecessary. I was subsisting on handfuls of Rice Chex and chocolate chip cookies. I was on a huge high, Josh’s face in 3-D, all the time, in the front of my brain. I couldn’t sleep now that Josh was coming. And I couldn’t sleep, thinking about Josh constantly, when George was right there next to me. The only person who’d ever believed enough in me to give me everything—a nice middle-class life, a child, love, security. I was the worst. I was an awful, heartless person. How cruel to George, to even think about Josh, much less plan to see him.
Worst of all, George was beginning to annoy me. Little things, like swishing his mouthwash around for exactly sixty seconds. The way he spent a whole half hour every evening shining his shoes while talking to Madame on the phone. Okay, maybe these weren’t little things. Everything George did, besides paying all our expenses, was bugging me. But I couldn’t say a word.
Early Tuesday morning, I watched impatiently as George watered his orchids. He did so twice a week in the warmer months so that they’d dry out by nighttime. He puttered around, moving a few orchids so that they’d have better access to light, and snipped off faded blooms with his little red pruners, dropping them with a rustling sound into a leftover Trader Joe’s bag. Then he went to the kitchen to prepare Tuesday waffles. We’d gotten a Belgian waffle maker as a wedding gift, and George’s whole face lit up when he opened that present. “I’m going to use this all the time!” he exclaimed, and it wasn’t just hyperbole—he did, every Tuesday. Separated the eggs, whipped the egg whites, folded it all together, and made waffles. All at 6:30 in the morning. Lucy woke up, crying as usual, smelled the waffles cooking, stopped, and waddled into the kitchen, her nighttime diaper soaked—she was potty trained during the day, but not at night. “Waffles!” she squealed delightedly, as she did every week, always a glorious surprise. I didn’t care—I wasn’t hungry in the least. When would George leave already?
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