We Have Everything Before Us

by Esther Yin-Ling Spodek

  From the hallway of the house, he can hear the white noise of the refrigerator. His daughter’s door is closed. His wife is in the guest room off the living room, he presumes. Her door is also closed. Simeon the cat is asleep on his back near the family room couch. Phil can see Simeon from where he is standing, his white cat chest gently rising and falling, legs quivering at an awkward position half in the air. Phil has never seen another cat sleep in this way. For a dog, it would be a signal that he is comfortable enough to show his belly. But Phil doesn’t know what this means for a cat.

  He thinks of the visit to Eleanor and her barbecue. How will she see him when he arrives alone, not surrounded by his family as he was at their last meeting? Will she think of him as someone incapable of keeping a family together? He has a knot in his stomach. He drinks more water and opens his computer, which is sitting on the kitchen island, recharging.

  Phil begins to write. The internet is a thread connecting him to someone who will listen and sympathize, and it feels like a direct conversation, in the moment, even though it is not. He is aware that some days it doesn’t matter if it is Eleanor or someone else.

  Hi Eleanor, I know I mentioned that my wife is leaving me, that we are trying to split amicably so that we can remain friends and still share the business together, that at night we sit at the table in the dining room with all of our assets spread out on sheets of paper, and a calendar open. Sometimes she won’t say anything to me but to answer my questions with a single word or sound. Sometimes she cries and I can’t reach her from where I am sitting to comfort her, and I think she is the one who has put that distance between us so that she can’t change her mind about leaving me. But I didn’t exactly tell you the whole story.

  No. Wrong. Delete.

  Eleanor, my wife and I are getting divorced. I have told you some of this before. She has a friend she is with constantly, and I can’t watch them together anymore. He comes to our house. He drives her to church. They don’t touch each other in public, but I don’t know what they are doing when I am not around. And I have seen his text messages. About how he wants to hold her hand or sit with her or put his arm around her when she cries. I wouldn’t have written that sort of crap to a girl when I was in high school. I have tried to convince her to come back. I want to say to her, ‘You don’t have to do this.’ But now the words feel stuck inside me. I don’t really say anything to her.

  Too much information? Does she need to know this much? Delete.

  Dear Eleanor, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression of me, that I am the same person I was when we were in high school, that I didn’t grow up and change. My wife wouldn’t sleep with me anymore, so I found Sarayu and Linda saw the emails. That is why Linda gets upset when you and I talk or email. Yet it doesn’t occur to her that her friend—the guy she goes with to church—isn’t going to bother me? That her shift from a non-believing Catholic to attending a Protestant megachurch with a man who is ten years younger doesn’t seem a bit strange? You bet it’s strange. I can’t emphasize enough how strange it is to me.

  Delete again. He sits back, puts his hands behind his head, elbows out, stretches, breathes, sips more water. He clears his mind. The page is blank. The refrigerator kicks on again. Phoenix rolls onto her other side, flipping her legs into the air, then sighs deeply, sounding human. Once again Phil feels as though he doesn’t have the right words to say what he wants to say. Something like, will you still be there, at the other end of this computer connection, in your home with your family, when you find out who I really am?

  Eleanor, I am hoping we can have time to talk and catch up when I see you again. I have a lot to tell you. Can’t wait to see you on the weekend.

  He presses send and logs out. Phoenix raises her head and watches him as he pads out of the kitchen, then returns to her former position. Upstairs, Phil lies in his bed and stares at the ceiling for what seems like an hour, until there is light through the thin, vertical spaces between the curtain panels, until he feels his eyes close and eventually he doesn’t know that he is falling asleep.

  TRAFFIC HAS BEEN thick and slow. Stopped in his car, Phil texts Eleanor, “I’m running late. Sorry.”

  “No worries,” she answers.

  He gets to the final stoplight and looks for a parking spot. He can see the source of the traffic jam: people moving their cars in and out of parking spaces along the two-lane street. He taps on the steering wheel impatiently.

  He is late because of Linda. He honestly hadn’t expected her to react so strongly. “You are the one who wants the divorce,” he had said, as she found reason after reason for him to stay home. He wanted to say, “For Christ’s sake! I’m visiting her family.” But he avoided Eleanor’s name or anything about her for that matter.

  While Phil looked at his wife, who stood with her mouth wide, her hands splayed, pleading, everything about her body exuding anger and hurt, he suddenly wondered about Sarayu and how she must have looked and felt when she read the email he had written to her to say that it was all over. It wasn’t something he had let himself think about in a long time. In Linda’s place, he saw Sarayu’s dark brown eyes, glossy with tears, the shape of her shoulders curved inward, her upper body slumped as she put her head in her hands. Then he saw Eleanor and thought of how he would have to explain himself to her, and that he was sorry for his mistakes. Would she listen? Would she offer him forgiveness?

  But, Linda … she’d left him speechless. Should he say that she was right, “Yes, it’s my fault. Please say you won’t leave me. Water under the bridge?” But how much could he change, realistically?

  As he opened his mouth to say something, and these thoughts flooded his head, the words were stuck. And once he realized that he had nothing to say to his wife, nothing that she wanted to hear, he picked up his overnight bag and walked out the door to his car. He left. Now he is here, just west of Evanston, waiting for the traffic to abate. What is he doing?

  11

  ON THE MORNING after Phil’s email, Sarayu quit her job as a traveling RN. In a phone call, she told her boss that she had a family emergency in Toronto. She packed a small suitcase and took her car to the mechanic for an oil change and tire rotation. When she picked up her car, she leaned her head on the steering wheel and tears poured from her eyes. The mechanic knocked on the window and asked if she was all right, and could she move her car?

  She drove north toward Wisconsin, away from the northwestern Illinois towns where she had traveled for work. She did not go to Toronto and her family. What would she say to them? That she had been in a relationship with a married man? Her grandmother had grown up in India. What would she say to her? And Sarayu’s sister, married and raising her two young boys?

  Now, driving into Wisconsin, she faced her obsession with Phil, her embarrassment over the sex in motel rooms, in dark, secret places.

  Sarayu wanted to forget their first meeting, going to Phil’s home. His family was away. He had grilled salmon and they drank a lot of wine. She felt a trancelike state of sexuality. When they walked in the darkness along the river, she went into a nearby thicket and took off her clothes. As she slipped into the water, she knew he was watching her. Her boldness surprised him.

  At a truck stop near Green Bay, she bought two bottles of cheap wine.

  That evening, drunk from the wine, she tried her best not to telephone Phil. But when she did, his daughter answered, and Sarayu hung up, suddenly frightened of what she had done, and by her inability to control herself. She didn’t know how much Phil’s wife and family knew about the affair. She had never called his home before.

  Waking up in a sweat and tearful, she could hear the air conditioner hum and the pounding of children’s feet on the carpeted hallway. She dozed. At one point she thought Phil was there in the motel room with her. She took some Ativan.

  In the morning, Sarayu woke with a hangover. She made coffee, placing the premeasured filter pack in the coffee maker and filling the machine with water. There was some
thing calming about following the simple instructions, when she was far away from her problems. She drank the coffee and peered out the window between the drapes at the untended field beyond the parking lot. She felt the compulsion to check her phone, even though she had blocked Phil’s number.

  She threw her bag in the back of the car and filled the gas tank at a nearby station. She continued her journey north, without checking the rearview mirror.

  The following morning, in northern Minnesota, Sarayu woke without a hangover. She showered, and, in her mind, she tested herself. She thought about Phil. Her pulse did not increase. Her head felt clear. She stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror. Her summer tan lines had faded and her skin was an even tone. As she smoothed her wet hair with a brush, she could feel the tension of the plastic bristles against her scalp. She dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and went to the lobby for breakfast.

  Over coffee and a hard-boiled egg, she watched young children insert bread in the toaster and pour milk over cereal. She saw adults absorbed in newspapers or the broadcast on the television set attached to a wall. A hotel server refilled her coffee, and as she said thank you, she did not recognize the voice that came from deep in her throat.

  Sarayu was thirty-seven years old. She had never wanted to have children. She had been independent for a long time. Even while seeing Phil, she had kept to her own schedule, which was often complicated.

  Back in her room, she checked the emails and messages from her friends at home on her phone. Of course, there was nothing from Phil. She took a deep breath and decided that this was good, that her friends cared about her. She took time to send answers, that she was coming home, an estimate of when she would be there. She used the hair dryer to fix her hair. She put on a face moisturizer and hand cream, lipstick and a sweater, and straightened herself out before folding dirty clothes into her suitcase. Then she did a once-over to see that she had packed everything.

  At the desk she asked for directions to the nearest gas station, where she filled the tank, washed the windows, and checked the windshield wiper fluid. She still carried the physical ache of rejection. She knew it wasn’t just Phil, but perhaps a series of similar instances with men who could not commit, who would not interfere with her independence, who would not want children or the life her grandmother and sister had chosen. Out on the highway, she drove toward Chicago and her apartment. It was time to be independent again. It was time to go.

  DRIVING SOUTH FROM Green Bay, Sarayu noticed the trees were yellow and orange and dotted with brown leaves. Fall. She had not noticed them on the drive north, as if they had changed completely in a few days. Now she saw rows and rows of dried cornstalks crumpled in the fields.

  At the point where she reached the edge of the Milwaukee suburbs, she could not help but think of the time she had met Phil at the Milwaukee Art Museum, a white, skeletal structure that imitated the riggings of a boat. On that spring day it had been unusually cold, and she wore a winter coat over a silk blouse and a skirt, thinking he might take her to dinner after the museum. But in the end, the museum was merely a meeting place before going to a hotel. She saw him waiting at the entrance and flew at him. He caught her in an embrace that made her think they were really in love. “I’m right here,” he had said. They wandered briefly through a Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit, pretending to concentrate on the drawings and floor plans of various homes and businesses, holding hands while they looked at paintings of uncomfortable chairs in tall, empty watercolor-washed spaces. It was so much like the college romances she’d had, where she and the boy whose hand she held only thought about each other as they wandered the concrete campus, through crowds of students. At least, this was what she remembered. Afterward, when Phil took her to the hotel, he didn’t want to go out to dinner, and she stupidly agreed. They ate cold room service on top of the sheets. It had been another one of those times with him where she felt hidden away, even in a city far from his own. At the time she could not articulate how much the whole thing bothered her. Instead, she let him decide how things would be. This way, it had helped her not to think about his wife and daughter, or about her own family, about the layers of disapproval.

  She drove along the beltway of Milwaukee, past industrial buildings colored by soot and age, and snaked along a skyway in between them, billboards lining the roadway as if sticking up from nowhere. Eventually the roads forked, one way west toward where Phil lived, the other back home to Chicago.

  NOW THAT SHE had quit her job, she had time to clean her apartment and throw out the rancid food. She kept busy, meeting friends for coffee, lunch, dinner. She filled her calendar, and friends assumed she was simply taking a vacation between jobs. Or they did not altogether understand why she had quit something she had seemed to enjoy. She had never told them that the part of traveling for her job that she loved most had been spending time with Phil. Instead she simply said that she didn’t want to stay in another hotel. She wanted to be home. This her friends accepted without question. In fact, upon arriving home, she never wanted to smell the starch of hotel sheets or the dry floral scent of hotel soap. She never again wanted to eat takeout or room service on top of a bed. She didn’t want to ever worry if the man she was seeing felt the same way about her as she did about him, or about the consequences of what she was doing to his family.

  Gradually, she willed herself not to remember his face, or his eyes, or the difference in color and size of their clasped hands. She did not look at couples walking entwined together on the streets of her Andersonville neighborhood, or sitting on the same side of a booth in a restaurant. She no longer had anything to remind her of Phil in her apartment, on her computer, or her phone. She tried, in the middle of the night, to read The Economist when she woke up thinking about him, and to forget him so that he was not a part of her anymore in the times when she could not control her thoughts. Soon, she would find that she had gone a whole lunch with a girlfriend, or a dinner in front of a television program, without him popping into her thoughts.

  And things began to settle down.

  12

  THE TREES ARE old and full along Central Street. They make tiny movements that shift and filter light from the west, casting transient shadows on the pavement. Kaye watches out the window of a coffee and gelato shop on the south side of the street. She has come to pass the time with a newspaper in the hope that her daughter might walk past. Surprisingly, instead of Clara and her teen girlfriends, Kaye spots the Norse god. At first, she is uncertain. She has only met him once. But when he stands next to his Alfa Romeo, trying to use the credit-card parking meter, she gets a better look. She is not one to forget faces. He is wearing tight jeans and tries to put his wallet into his back pocket with some difficulty. This makes Kaye laugh. When he turns in her direction, she bows her head and hides behind the open newspaper, looking up to see him cross the street. She leaves her latte on the counter and exits the café to follow him.

  Phil goes to the florist. Kaye lingers on the sidewalk outside, looking at displays of large, glazed planter pots and ornate wrought iron garden chairs, all covered with plants. She moves, trying not to be obvious, to the store next door. But the filmy sundresses and platform shoes in the window make her feel old.

  Eventually she enters the florist. It is dark and filled with the wet earthy smell of just-watered plants. Phil is talking to the shop girl and gesturing with his credit card in his hand. They share a joke. He begins to face Kaye, but she simultaneously turns her back to him and picks up a potted succulent. Phil looks directly at her but says nothing. Either he doesn’t see her face, or he doesn’t recognize her. Kaye hears the wrinkle of tissue paper, the credit card processing, and small talk she would never remember if asked. Then, Phil is on his way out, and she catches his cologne, not unpleasant but strong. She whispers, “I told you so, Eleanor,” to herself. Glancing at the young woman behind the counter, a contemporary of Clara’s, her first thought is to wonder if Phil had been flirting with her. She is sickened by the idea.
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  ELEANOR STANDS AT the sink, deveining shrimp. A fishy smell hovers over the kitchen. She feels like kicking herself for choosing a shrimp appetizer. But the shrimp, and then the chicken marinating in the fridge, will keep Frank busy at his grill. She stops a moment to check her hands. Fish. What man wants a fishy woman?

  But no. No. Nothing will happen with Phil. So, what does it matter? Even so, nervous, sweaty, she scrubs the sink and then takes the brush and scrubs her hands. Annie paws her leg. She knows about the fish. To her, fish smell is good.

  With the shrimp skewered, seasoned, and sitting in a baking pan in the refrigerator, she opens the window and increases the speed of the ceiling fan, then goes upstairs to shower and change into a sundress. Already this makes her feel calmer. Back in the kitchen, the fish smell is dissipating. She can tell because the dog has gone.

  It is late afternoon, and the boys will be home soon from school. In their usual Friday routine, they will go straight to their computers without saying hello or giving Eleanor a chance to ask about their day. They will begin to play war games. Sometimes they even play these games against each other, sitting in the same room and only communicating through their computers. But she does not necessarily know that this is happening when she walks past and looks and sees their eyes on the laptop screens.

  Eleanor puts a bottle of red wine on the counter and two whites in the fridge. She has made a jug of her own peppermint iced tea to have early, so that she doesn’t get drunk with Phil before Frank even gets home. Everything is prepped, and now she awaits Phil’s arrival. In her pocket, she feels her phone buzz. It is a text from Phil. He will be late.