There were questions she had wanted to ask him: Are you going to the class reunion? Do you miss being in the military? What do you recall from when we were teenagers?
There are questions she would like to ask now: Why would you meet me at a time when there was every chance that your soon-to-be-ex-wife and your mother-in-law would also be there? Was that meeting really just to hear your daughter sing in a noisy bar for twenty minutes? Was it a test? Were you checking me out to see if I was the same person as the photo? In imaginary conversations there are no real answers.
And then there was Kaye. Next time, Eleanor will give Kaye a drink limit.
Frank interrupts, calling out from downstairs that he is getting ready to leave. Eleanor already knows that Frank is going to play golf with Napoleon. They will spend their time together competing for the best score, and at the same time, talking about how they ought to be playing better. It won’t be their best game. It never is their best game. She hears the squeak of Frank’s sneakers on the wood floor by the back door, and the clank and crash of his golf clubs as he sets them down. Is he being loud on purpose to get her attention? Or is he just not even trying to be quiet because he thinks she is sleeping? Eleanor believes the noise is all for her benefit, an opportunity for her to not ignore him.
Frank leaves and Eleanor gets out of bed. Downstairs it is quiet in the kitchen, and the strong midday light washes the room from the northern windows. She takes the milk from the refrigerator to put into the coffee Frank had brought her. Frank is the sort of person who doesn’t complete a task. In his attempt to do something kind for her, he has forgotten that she takes milk.
What would it be like to invite Phil over to visit? Would Frank be observant? Would he notice the crush she has on Phil? Frank is rarely observant. Eleanor stirs the milk in her coffee absentmindedly with her index finger and drops her hand to her side, where Annie licks it. Annie makes a low, guttural sound, nearly singing out for more, and Eleanor imagines Phil standing there with her, flirtatiously telling her that she shouldn’t let the dog lick the coffee from her finger. Then he would make up something ridiculous after that, about licking fingers, and she would laugh. Even this gives her a tingle.
Eleanor’s phone vibrates in the pocket of her robe. Kaye’s name is on the screen, along with a text about meeting soon for lunch. Kaye wants to hash out the evening with Phil and his family. But Kaye embarrassed Eleanor so much with her police detective act that Eleanor doesn’t answer the text. Kaye never understands why she embarrasses her friend.
Just as she is about to check her computer for email, hoping to see something from Phil, Eleanor hears boy feet flapping on the stairs, and a voice that sounds as if it has been ruined by years of cigarette smoking, though it belongs to a seventeen-year-old who has likely never smoked a thing in his life but is allergic to waking up.
“Mom,” Eugene says. “Mom, I think I put all of my clothes in the washing machine last night and forgot to put them in the dryer. You weren’t here to remind me.”
“To remind you?”
“Dad doesn’t.”
“All in one load?”
“I don’t have much.”
Eleanor closes her laptop. “Put them in the dryer now.” She is feeling frustrated at being interrupted.
“It will take an hour.”
“So?”
Eugene looks at her with widening eyes. “I have a study group in thirty minutes. I have no clothes to wear.”
“Not even a shirt and pants?”
“It’s all in the machine.”
Eleanor pictures the balance of her washing machine ruined by every piece of Eugene’s clothing, the darks and lights, all mixed together. From upstairs she hears the triumphant shout of her younger son, Liam, “He is NOT wearing my clothes!”
Eugene shakes his head and continues down the stairs to the basement with the slow resolute gait of someone who does not want to do what he is about to do. From her seat at the kitchen island, Eleanor hears Eugene shut the metal dryer door, then watches for him to climb the stairs and appear in the doorway. When he does, his eyes are puffy, his dark, shoulder-length mop of curls frizzed into a halo around his head. She knows it will be a while before she can read her email. She asks him, “Is the dryer on?” Without answering, he turns and makes his way down the steps to the basement again.
ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Phil writes to her:
Eleanor, I love the idea of visiting you. Thanks for the invite. It will be a nice break from the crap here at the house. Let me know when your barbecue is. Maybe I should stay the night and we could have some time to really catch up. Talk soon, Phil.
On Monday, Phil’s wife begins communications with an email message. Eleanor is sitting with her morning coffee on the bed, with the laptop open. She hears the sparrows outside and puts off breaking up the latest nest. She feels her blood pressure spike as she sees the message from Linda@ … She knows who it is.
“Who are you?” Linda writes.
They had barely met. Why would she put out this effort with a divorce imminent? Why care? Does she know the extent of Eleanor’s correspondence with Phil?
Usually, this is the time of day, after Frank has left for the commuter train, before the boys go to school, when Eleanor has been writing to Phil. It is a private time, when she can briefly forget that she is married and part of a family. She writes about the people in her neighborhood, the demands her sons make on her, what recipes she has extracted from the newspaper and whether they work out. So far, Phil has been very interested.
The meeting with him to hear his daughter sing had been arranged at the last minute. Does Eleanor want to tell this to Linda? It is not clear, from what Phil has written, how much Linda knows about their correspondence. Eleanor wants to tell the almost-ex that she didn’t know she and her mother would be at the concert, and that she was just meeting an old high school friend. The whole meal was not even something Eleanor had thought would happen. What am I getting into? She thinks as she prepares to type.
Eleanor knows she spends way too much time wondering what Phil is doing during the day, trying to imagine what his house is like, where his wife’s room is in proximity to his, what their conversations are about. Perhaps the awkwardness between the divorcing husband and wife is something they have grown into. Eleanor had only seen it once. He says that she thwarts his attempts to salvage the family dinners by attending the evening church service. He says that he finds her reading self-help books. Does this sound like the portrait of a woman who would send an email? For a moment, Eleanor decides that she will not respond. Then, thirty seconds later, she changes her mind, but she will not do it right away. She is going to think more on it.
She gets out of bed, leaving the sparrows to continue condo building. She hears a faint, low expletive from the other side of Eugene’s door as she knocks to tell him he has to get up for school. She watches Liam move toward the bathroom, then back and forth to his own room to get items of clothing and drop them on the floor. Eugene yells from his room, “Five more minutes, Mother.” But if Eleanor relents, he will miss the bus and she will get a phone call asking her to drive him to school because it is too far and too late to walk. Every day, as though she is training for an athletic event, she watches the clock, timing her sons’ departure to middle and high school. Liam is on time. Eugene is not. Even though he is the older son, Eleanor must regularly push him out the door. Maybe this is because he is the older one, and she has done something different with Liam.
Eleanor waits for them, and in her brain she draws a blank on how to answer Linda’s email. Her heart thumps. At last, the boys leave. Now, she wants to be done with the email to Linda.
She wants to write to Linda, “Who do you think you are? How did you get my email address?” But as Eleanor knows, this is too much for now. And if Linda is like Phil—as couples who have been married this long tend to be—she won’t answer these questions. Then Eleanor thinks, “I am a big deal.” She wants to be a big deal.
She will wait just a little longer to answer.
She showers, dresses, and leashes the dog. Annie jumps at the door and then claws at Eleanor’s stomach as she tries to bend to put on her shoes. Outside, new pale green shoots are growing in neighbors’ flowerbeds because the weather is warming. The sun is strong for May, and she can feel it on her cheeks and arms. Annie pulls forcefully and Eleanor yanks her back to try to correct her behavior. But she is not in the mood to discipline the dog. She knows that Phil’s almost-ex has found the emails from a past “other woman.” She is not sure how Linda got into Phil’s computer. Wouldn’t Phil take measures to protect himself?
Eleanor considers the two of them living in the same house because, though the almost-ex wants to leave Phil, she won’t move out. Yet he says they have all the divorce papers filed with each other’s lawyers. Phil says that she has walked in while he was on the telephone with Eleanor, and she was angry. This, of course, makes the whole thing more exciting for Eleanor, in a dangerous way, she concedes. Linda is a jealous person. Her temper swings, and Phil says this is because she has trouble with her menstrual cycles. Eleanor has never felt this way—the danger and the edginess—in all of her married life with Frank.
Annie sees another dog, something short, white, and fluffy. She crouches into herding mode, with her ears pricked so that just the tips flop forward, and her eyes stare ahead, steady and unblinking. Her tail is parallel to the sidewalk and she pulls at the leash. Eleanor stops. Annie stops. “Does your dog want to play?” the woman holding the leash of the other dog says. The other dog trots blindly toward them as Annie lunges and bares her teeth. Eleanor now has to explain, “She isn’t friendly to other dogs.” The woman walks a large circle around and away from Annie, glaring at Eleanor as if to say, “You could have warned me.” Eleanor drags Annie home.
Inside her kitchen, Eleanor takes a glass of water and sits at her computer. She opens Linda’s email. “I am just a friend who grew up with Phil,” she replies. “That’s all.” She nearly writes that she doesn’t mean any harm, but stops short of admitting she has done something wrong. Only in her head.
Linda’s response is quick, as though she has been there, at her computer, waiting. “I know that. But who are you? What do you want? What is going on between you and my husband?”
Had Phil been open about his past affairs? Or simply not been careful? But what is happening now isn’t an affair. “Dear Linda,” Eleanor writes. “It’s not what you think. I have a husband and two sons. And I am aware that you and Phil have a complicated divorce.” Wait—scratch the last sentence. “Are still married.” Send.
At this point, Eleanor decides not to mention this correspondence to Phil. She wonders what Phil has said to his almost-ex, and about which one of them—husband or wife—is more truthful. Then she goes off to sort clothes for the laundry. The piles are smaller than usual, Eugene having recently done his own. She puts on talk radio but doesn’t pay attention to it. Then, at the computer, she writes to Linda, “What is it you want from me?” as if this distraction is overwhelming her attention.
Whether from at work or home, Linda is still answering. “You ought to know,” she writes to Eleanor, “that he has left a trail of women.”
“I am not interested in Phil that way,” Eleanor writes back.
“They have all said that. But I’ve seen it before. He sucks it all in, and forgets, and someday it will explode. I’ll be there to pick up the pieces for him, married to him or not. There is a list of women Phil has left behind. He tosses them in my face, like he did at the club, while our daughter was singing.
“I don’t understand why you were there to hear her play,” Linda continues to write. “Even if Phil asked you to come, why would you do that when I was there and my mother was there?”
Eleanor is now feeling guilty and manipulated. She doesn’t quite understand Linda’s intent, though she does understand Phil’s. She thinks she understands the idea of a safe relationship, a friendship under the watch of their families. She writes back that Phil only invited her because she lives in town, that she brought her friend, that she didn’t know the rest of the family would be there. Then she stops. How do you convince someone who is likely inconvincible? She deletes what she has written. Linda emails, “I’m praying for you.” And suddenly, just as quickly as she had appeared online, she is gone.
10
ELEANOR IS SLEEPY from the two glasses of wine she drank at lunch. She wouldn’t call herself drunk. Tipsy maybe. At home on the computer she writes, “Phil, what happened the other night? Why so many members of your soon-to-be estranged family? My girlfriend thinks that you and I are going to sleep together. In fact, she is convinced of it. I told her that this would be impossible because I am married to Frank and absorbed in the lives of my kids.” She stops typing and thinks about her lunch with Kaye at the plaza near the lake. They’d sat at the tables on the sidewalk patio, where they could see the lake between the high-rise condos across Sheridan Road. High-rise, by Wilmette standards.
“It isn’t completely out of the range of possibility,” she continues to write. “I am forty-eight. But I exercise to keep fit and I color my hair to hide the grey. I am not unattractive. Sometimes I want to ask my husband, ‘Honey, do you think I am still attractive?’ But he would look at me and say, ‘You might as well ask me if you look fat. What am I supposed to say?’ Isn’t there more than just how you look? Pheromones perhaps? Or animal magnetism? Do you sense this about me? Am I magnetic?”
At lunch, Eleanor and Kaye had both ordered sandwiches, gazpacho, and white wine, and before the drinks even arrived, Kaye had said, “What the heck was that all about?” referring to the meeting with Phil. “Who brings a family to see his old girlfriend?”
Eleanor had replied that she was not Phil’s old girlfriend. “We were just friends.”
Now she deletes the email and begins again. “Phil, do you really have lawyers putting your divorce together?” Kaye had rolled her eyes when Eleanor explained, once again, that Phil’s wife was living in the same house while she looked for her own. “Why is your wife living with you if she has left you? And don’t tell me it’s to save money. Is your divorce really happening?” Eleanor types. “You know, she emailed me the other day, sort of a territory-marking activity, I would say.” And then she adds, “Like my dog would do.”
Just as the sun became hot over their bacon, lettuce, and tomato, Eleanor had explained to Kaye, “I didn’t realize we’d go to a club, watch his kid sing, and then go out to eat afterward with his wife and mother-in-law.” She wonders how she may have misread Phil’s signals, that after the twenty minutes of hearing Jillian play, should she have taken Kaye and gone home? “Did we do something wrong?” she asked Kaye.
Kaye had answered her, “Remember my idea to go as your lesbian girlfriend to your high school reunion?”
“I do,” Eleanor replied. “I really shouldn’t listen to you.”
“Your wife,” she writes to Phil, “wants me to leave you alone. She says you have had many women and that you leave a trail of them behind you. This doesn’t seem like the Phil I remember, whose parents remained married while their children were in high school, who dated the same girl for two long years, even went to college with her before breaking up. Now I wonder myself why I am getting involved with someone like this. Please convince me that there are no other women ‘friends.’ Why would your wife lie to me? I can think of many reasons why she would, but with nothing going on between us now, why does she even care? She says that she is praying for me.” Delete.
“Phil, there is nothing I hate more than a woman who says she is praying for me. I don’t think of myself as the kind of person who needs to be prayed over. I thought I was a helpful sort of person. I used to volunteer at my kids’ school for hours a week, but I got burned out. I am burned out from being a wife.” Delete. Delete.
Kaye’s voice is in the back of Eleanor’s head. Their lunch conversation had become heated. “You do so want
to sleep with him. And why not? He’s a Norse god.”
Eleanor had answered, somewhat too seriously, “That’s not enough, Kaye.”
She types. “No one I know seems to pay attention to me the way that you do. If you would just say that what you really want is to sleep with me, then I would feel good psychologically and then we wouldn’t actually have to do it.” Again, delete.
Eleanor tries to think about the last time Frank wanted her spontaneously rather than out of necessity. She tries to think of the last time she wanted Frank, or when she wanted someone other than Phil. She comes up blank.
“Dear Phil, how is your garden? Have any good vegetables ripened yet? I have never had a garden here. The house is a hundred years old, and I have learned that there is lead paint in the soil around it, and that it takes centuries to biodegrade. So, we only have flowers, and the dog tramples them over. The yard looks terrible. There are kicked up piles of dirt along a path where she runs. Still, I am having a cookout dinner party in the yard next weekend. Will you come?” Press: send.
IT’S THE MIDDLE of the night and Phil can’t sleep. This is a chronic problem now. No sex, no sleep, no comfort, no warmth, no love. He gets up and walks around the bedroom in the darkness, watching the shadows that the outside light casts on the rumpled bedclothes. Finally, he crosses the hallway to the stairs and down to the kitchen. Phoenix is lying on the slatted wood floor on her side, legs out. He startles her as he turns on the light. She raises her head and he bends down to pat it. “Hey, girl.” He fills a glass of water and drinks like he has been thirsty for hours and the water will make him sleep. Then he fills Phoenix’s water bowl. In the kitchen window, he sees his reflection in the night blackness of the glass, blurry and wavering as he shifts from one leg to the other.
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