We Have Everything Before Us

by Esther Yin-Ling Spodek

  “But she is praying for you.” Kaye makes a snorting sound, laughter.

  “God.” Eleanor looks out the back open window and watches the house sparrows pick things up from the ground near the trash bins, labels that have fallen out of the garbage bags, puffs of dog undercoat, twigs, they make a trajectory upward toward the eaves.

  “There has got to be a reason why you want to hang out with this guy. Look at him: he’s attractive if you like that buffed, Scandinavian, former-military look. Frankly, I don’t care if anything did or is going to happen between you. Just be careful. The emails from his wife are weird. Even dangerous. You don’t know her. She still lives with him even though he says they are getting a divorce and it is her idea to leave. He comes to your home and she wants to know the details of the whole affair or whatever you want to call it. The list goes on. If she found your emails on his computer, she can find your house. She can find Frank and she can call him at work. What will happen then?”

  “None of that will happen,” Eleanor says, but she doesn’t believe her own words and it frightens her. She looks for excuses. “Other than what she writes, she seemed like a reserved person when we met her. The type who starves herself to make a point about her own suffering. She doesn’t seem aggressive.”

  “You don’t know her. She is writing to you. You are like an old girlfriend from high school and she cares. That, to me, is aggressive behavior. Have you ever initiated the emails?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure it’s even her writing those emails?”

  Eleanor stands at the sink and looks out the window at the wire fence and the spindly bushes and fluttering green leaves that divide her property from the neighbor’s. She pours her tea down the drain. “You are right,” she says.

  After dislodging herself from Kaye, she follows the sparrows upstairs and sits on her bed, staring out the double glass doors of the balcony as the birds flit back and forth, making their homes with the foraged material in their beaks. She is in a situation, she thinks, and she can’t/won’t be able to find a way to feel better about it. Out on the balcony, she stands and looks up at the sparrows. They hop and fly around the pigeon spikes, stabbing twigs into the pile of garbage that is their nest. Eleanor picks up the broom. She pulls out a wooden chair and climbs on it, swats, reaching the spikes, sending the sparrows out and upward and away. “Stop!” she screams at them. “Go away!” She slaps and slaps at the twigs and fur and cigarette butts, and they all fall to the ground below, just as the chair tips and Eleanor finds herself sprawled and weeping on the wooden slats of the balcony floor.

  17

  THE HOUSE IS empty again. Phil stands in the kitchen with his phone to his ear. In the background he can hear the sounds of the outdoors, wind rustling the grasses in the field beyond his property, robins calling out, neighbors talking to their children, all through the open windows and doors. He has waited all day to call Sarayu back, sitting at work, distracted, unable to concentrate. His wife at her desk, ten feet away. She made comments about how he wasn’t paying attention. And now, standing over the kitchen sink, looking out the window, watching Phoenix investigate the backyard, he listens to the rings of Sarayu’s line and for a moment he thinks of Eleanor.

  He paces. What a fuck up at her house. He takes a sponge from the sink basin and wipes the table, the countertops, the island, trying to clean things up. He disowns his embarrassment. If he spends too much time thinking about what happened with Eleanor … He feels he got out of the situation ok. He straightens the chairs around the table. “It’s Phil,” he says to the electronic voice on Sarayu’s voicemail. “Still playing phone tag. Looking forward to talking to you.”

  If he were to spend every day dwelling on all of his mistakes, he would be unable to move forward, to move away from his troubles with Linda. Sarayu seems to want to be friends again. He can concentrate on fixing what happened with her, at least for now. The rest—Linda, and perhaps Eleanor—he must put behind him.

  Phoenix is at the door waiting to come in. He scoops kibble into her bowl and she pants as she crosses the threshold before digging into her food with her nose. She looks up at Phil for more as he picks up his phone to dial again.

  This time she is there, a deeply feminine voice answers as if she is asking a question, because, Phil thinks, she knows he is the one calling. He hesitates because he doesn’t know what to say. He may have thought about it all weekend, on the drive home, and at work today. But now his mind is blank. There is nothing he can do to make up for the email he sent to her breaking off their affair.

  “Sarayu?”

  “Yes? Phil?”

  He hesitates again. “How are you?”

  Another open space in the conversation, and he fears it will be filled with one-word answers and long, long gaps. “You called a couple of days ago. Is everything okay?”

  “Is everything okay?” she asks, quietly. “Yes. What about you?”

  “Same old,” he answers. For now, he wants to say that he wants his wife to find a new place for herself, that the divorce was her idea, that he had really tried to be faithful to Linda after Sarayu. Yet he also wants to say that he made a mistake when he said that he didn’t want to see her again. Again, he imagines the smooth skin of her cheek and the fringe of her black hair falling over her forehead, and he feels a strong longing for her that covers up, or acts as a palliative, for the events of the weekend. “No. That isn’t what I meant to say,” comes out of his mouth.

  “No?” she says.

  “No.”

  “Divorce?”

  “Yes.”

  “From what you have told me in the past, your wife would not have stayed with you. Not by now.”

  “No.”

  Another space.

  “I have a new job,” she says. “I’m in Chicago at a local hospital. It wasn’t hard to find. Every hospital needs nurses.”

  He laughs uncomfortably.

  “Same apartment,” she says. “You have only been here once. Maybe you don’t remember it.”

  “Of course I remember it.”

  In the quiet he can hear her breathing, or perhaps he imagines it. And he thinks of her sitting at her window in the soft chair where they had once sat together, she curled into his body in the early morning after they had been awake all night, and the sun shone lightly through the summer leaves into the apartment. He breathes deeply and wonders if he will ever feel that sense of peace and romance again. Then something unexpected comes out—“Can I see you?”—when what he should actually have said is that he is sorry for hurting her, but the words jumble.

  “No,” she says with immediacy. “Not now, but we can talk on the phone.” He can hear the rush of air that comes from her speaking against the phone, powerful and brief. “Would that be all right with you?”

  “Yes.” He wants to see her face and what sort of expression she has on it. “I am so sorry, Sarayu,” he finally says. “Don’t be angry with me. Don’t hate me.”

  “I don’t hate you.”

  “It was what it was.”

  “No. It’s not like that at all,” she says, and he can sense her sadness, unless it is his own. “Listen, I need to get somewhere. I have to go. But we can talk again. Can’t we? You have my number. I have yours. I promise that we will talk again. All right?”

  He feels himself nod. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I hope so.”

  “We’ll talk soon, if that is okay with you.”

  “Soon is fine.”

  When they have said their goodbyes, simple, one-word exits, he sits on the floor of his kitchen and puts his hand on Phoenix’s paw. She tolerates this. It is difficult for him to sort out what is going on in his head right now. That Sarayu had called him. That she wanted to talk to him again. He is emotionally spent, he thinks, but it’s more than that. He looks around at all of his wife’s belongings, shoes under the table, a sweater on the back of a chair. All of it unwanted. It won’t be
her house in the end, yet she has marked her territory. Now, this minute, he wants the divorce finalized, and this is a thought he would like to share with someone, like Eleanor, but he has ruined that relationship.

  He is reluctant to communicate with Eleanor—should he apologize? The entire incident did not seem to be one person’s fault. How did things get so complicated? How did they get to the garage in her house? There is so much in his head right now that it is difficult to feel a single emotion, like embarrassment. He was tired, not at all alert. He fell into the situation with Eleanor—he was drunk—then, with the call from Sarayu on his mind, he could not perform. This hadn’t happened in a long time, certainly not with Sarayu. Eleanor seemed like the kind of woman who would understand. But that was not how she had reacted. And he really did not want that sort of relationship with her, the kind where she cheats on her husband with him. He never did. So, could they go back to being friends? Could he write to her? Would she write back? And would she tell her husband about what happened?

  If he were writing to her, if he was sure she wasn’t angry with him, he would tell her, “I want my life sorted out. I want to move on. I want my wife to pack her things and take all of the junk she has left all over the house. This was all her idea: leaving me. Why can’t she just get it together and move out?”

  But he is not writing to Eleanor. He will not. On the floor of the kitchen, petting the dog, he breathes so deeply that he feels he will explode in tears. Still, he does nothing. He is not writing to anyone on the computer, or throwing a chair, or shouting. Phoenix looks up into his eyes with an ignorance of what sort of person he has been. To her, he could be an ax murderer, he thinks, and then laughs out loud at his own joke. “Hey girl,” he says to his dog.

  Phoenix gives him some hope. She makes few demands. She loves to be petted. She puts her head on his lap, and, in a way, he feels some relief and a tiny bit of happiness. Sarayu does not hate him after what he has done to her. There will be another call, something he can look forward to. Another call. He leans back against the painted wall, which is cool to the touch, and closes his eyes. “She doesn’t hate me,” he says to himself. Two other women may hate him, Linda and Eleanor, but Sarayu does not. In the quiet of the kitchen, before his wife and daughter come home for the evening, he feels his lips spread into a smile.

  PHIL IS IN bed reading when Linda and their youngest daughter come home. They enter the house with excited voices and Phil, at first, thinks that they are chatting; when he listens more carefully, he realizes that they are arguing. He laughs to himself that Linda is dealing with whatever this is alone. He hears the crinkle of plastic shopping bags. They must have been to the mall. At least it wasn’t church, he thinks, or maybe it was both.

  They come into the house as if he doesn’t live here anymore. They go to the kitchen and he hears the door of the refrigerator open.

  He hears his wife’s light footsteps on the carpeted stairs, then a tap on the door to the bedroom.

  “What is it?” He puts his book on the bedside table and watches her peek through the door.

  “I need to talk to you?” She says it like she is asking rather than demanding.

  “I’m here,” he answers. She has always put things in the form of a question, something he thought was an element of being shy. Now he believes it is a part of the passive-aggressive behavior associated with their split up. There always seems to be something she has planned beneath the artificial question.

  “I’m here,” he says, again.

  She walks into the room. Where she once would have sat near him on the bed in this situation, she stands near the doorway. “I spoke to the real estate agent today. I’m putting an offer on a new place.”

  He smiles without thinking about it, then says, “Why so soon?”

  “That’s not nice, Phil.”

  He shrugs. “You told me you wanted to leave me months ago. You are still here.”

  She shields her forehead with the palm of her hand and looks down at the floor. To him, in this moment, she looks frail. “It’s not my fault,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “I guess that’s it.” She turns around.

  “Wait.” He dislikes calling her name.

  “What?”

  “Where is the house?”

  “It’s a ten-minute drive from here. Isabel can go back and forth.”

  “Where did you take her this evening?”

  “Shopping. She wanted to go to the mall.”

  “You could have let me know.”

  She is facing the door. “Why? It was a last-minute thing.”

  “But it’s a forty-five-minute drive each way. And it’s almost ten on a school night.”

  She turns to look at him. “Yes.” She walks out the door and closes it softly behind her.

  Phil returns to his book. This time it is a novel that Eleanor had recommended and loaned to him. He can’t concentrate on it. He thinks of the conversation with his wife, how he feels she controls it. He thinks of Sarayu and their phone call and imagines other telephone conversations, strangely similar conversations to the emails he had exchanged with Eleanor. In his imagination, Sarayu tells him about the commute to her new job in Chicago, the el and a bus, what her neighborhood is like in the summer—and what she does every day. He thinks of her rising in the morning, swinging her brown legs over the side of the bed and sliding her delicate narrow feet into slippers. He sees her padding in her nightgown to the kitchen to make coffee, reaching into the cabinet for the filters and a mug. He remembers her kitchen, the painted white cabinets, metal countertops, and light green walls. It was a place where she had not spent a lot of time because her job took her away too much. All of this distracts him from his wife and her behavior. Just as Sarayu had in the past. Just as Eleanor had for a while. He wants to call, email, text Sarayu, but consciously he is going to be careful with her now, take it slowly. He wants to ask her what she is doing and picture it. This might settle him into sleep.

  Instead, Phil gets out of bed and walks to the door. He hears Linda and Isabel talking in the kitchen. They laugh as they talk (he hopes it isn’t about him). This echoes through the family room and the hallway to the stairs, like an old, old sound he isn’t used to anymore. He reaches for his T-shirt and shorts and dresses to go downstairs. As he approaches the kitchen, he calls out their names and they stop talking. “So, you went to the mall,” he says. Linda nods and leaves as soon as he enters the room.

  “Hi, Dad,” Isabel says. Where she used to stop what she was doing and throw her arms around his neck, here she merely turns from halfway inside the refrigerator. He isn’t sure if it’s the breakup of her parents’ marriage or adolescence that makes her act this way. He walks to her and kisses her cheek. “You going to show me what you bought?”

  Isabel leaves the refrigerator and lifts the shopping bag up to the countertop. She lays out the clothing she has purchased: a bathing suit, shorts, T-shirts, all in bright colors. He looks over these items, sees the price tags, and smiles because it is all more expensive than he feels it should be.

  Then, this is the instant when it dawns on him that he will soon no longer have these occasions. He won’t be waiting up for his wife and daughter, and he won’t be able to hold on to the family moments. They are already gone. He hugs and kisses his daughter good night and reminds her to let the dog out. He passes the guest room—now his wife’s room—on the way to the stairs. His wife is locked in for the night.

  IN THE OFFICE, on Thursday, Carol, an administrative assistant, brings homemade coffee cake. Phil eats three large slices, one after the other, which is not part of his diet, but he can’t help himself. This makes Carol happy, and the other gals tease him that stress is going to fatten him up. Linda is nowhere to be seen today. She is, perhaps, taking a personal day. Since she is co-owner of the company, she can do this, but she has yet to call in.

  After two local sales calls, Phil sits at his computer, taking a break. He has not written to
Eleanor since seeing her almost a week ago. She has not written to him. He now believes that he should not burn bridges. And to show that this is true, at least for him, he opens up his account and begins to write to her.

  “Dear Eleanor,” he starts. “I made it home okay. The weather was good. The roads were good. No traffic. Came home to an empty house. Don’t know where everyone was, maybe at church. They go to church a lot these days. It keeps Linda busy and out of my hair.

  “Lunch with my daughter was good. She has a couple of exams coming up, and school doesn’t end until June, so she is a little stressed.

  “I really appreciate that you invited me for dinner. I don’t get invited to dinner much. Linda took all of our friends, so my social life, you know, is limited. They are on her side. They see me at the supermarket or the gas station and shoot looks at me like I’ve done something terrible to them. I know I haven’t hurt them personally.

  “I hope I haven’t caused any trouble between you and Frank. I think he’s a nice guy. And I am sorry things didn’t work like we had hoped. I like you a lot. I would like us to be friends, even if the situation is awkward.

  “Think it over. I still want to be your friend. I’m still here.”

  He hesitates before he presses send. He glances to see if any of the other people in the office can see him.

  No one in the office will know.

  18

  SARAYU WALKS QUICKLY along a street perpendicular to her own, crowded with people looking into the windows of shops and those exiting from the el stop ahead. She checks her wallet again. She wouldn’t want Phil to pay for her dinner. She is done with that. She walks anxiously along a block of ethnic restaurants, Turkish, Italian, Asian, coffee and frozen yogurt, a couple of taquerias, all reflecting the people moving in and out of the neighborhood. Once, Scandinavian immigrants dominated, but the last Swedish bakery has closed.