Every Day

by Elizabeth Richards

  “You’re the one I’ve thought about,” he says, “since I’ve known about this illness thing. The minute I knew I wanted to call you. But you’ve got so much now, a world, don’t you know, and I couldn’t imagine the phone ringing in it and me being on the other end. I’d get your husband, I thought. Or my son. I didn’t think I had the right.”

  I remember Fowler saying “my son” into Isaac’s minute ear on the nights none of us slept. He’d say it over and over to calm Isaac at his colicky worst, and once in a while it worked.

  All the years I’ve spent adding tarnish to Fowler’s image, I never once suspected he cared about rights. And I certainly couldn’t imagine him thinking of me at a crucial juncture, only in passing, or if he were drunkenly detailing his past to a woman who had asked about it.

  “You were my friend,” he says, focused on the wood grain of the sea chest that works as a coffee table. “You were a wonderful friend, and Isaac was a miracle. I couldn’t bear the weight of it, you see. I was unable.”

  I had rather hoped we’d get into this later, afterward, in bed, talking lazily after sex.

  “What weight,” I say quietly. “What do you mean?”

  He clasps his hands behind my head and looks hard into my face. “I thought I would burst from it, from what I felt, so responsible, so panicked from his absolute perfection, so sorry I wasn’t going to manage to stay. When I saw him, I knew nothing would ever be the same.”

  Having had three children, this doesn’t strike me as a new or unmanageable state of mind and heart. “That’s what happens when you have babies,” I say. “You have to move over. You have to not mind things getting different.”

  “I’m telling you,” he says. “I couldn’t. I was unable.”

  “How did you know I’d be able?” I ask. “How did you know I’d stay and see things through? I could have chosen to come apart at the seams and leave Isaac in a dumpster. How did you know I’d manage when you couldn’t?”

  Tears are on their way, and my voice shakes. He slides his palms over my shoulders and down my arms. This time, his hands are steady.

  “Because I knew you could. We’re different. Look at where we are now.”

  “And where are you?” I shout at him. “Other than ill and established in the East Village, where are you?” I can’t believe I’m angry at him for being sick. I can’t believe I’m capable of such cruelty.

  He looks into his lap. “I’m where I’ve always been,” he says. “On the periphery. Peering in. Basically, I’m nowhere. It’s not a place you were comfortable with. I knew that, but I wanted to give you what you wanted. I tried, and I failed. End of story.”

  I’m not satisfied. I’m hot and drunk and crying and not the bottomless pit of love I thought I was an hour ago. “End of story?”

  “Mine, not yours.”

  I pull his arms back around my waist. For some reason I cannot bear for this afternoon to turn sour. “No,” I say, easing us back onto the cushions.

  “Is this what you want?” he whispers into my neck.

  I don’t answer, just concentrate on the task at hand, his shirt buttons, belt buckle, his weight on me.

  • • •

  I call home from the outdoor lot where Fowler and I parked. “The girls are going crazy,” Simon says, exasperated. “Where are you?”

  “Downtown,” I tell him. “I’m on my way.”

  “Hurry. Jane’s got plans for you.”

  “I’ll take her out when I get home.” I spaced out on the trip to Sam Goody. She’s probably seething. I don’t know how I’ll achieve all this travel today. In traffic it will take me an hour and a half to get home, but I will take her to get that tape, by God.

  “Isaac got on base three times,” he says. “He’s gone down to Burger King for a victory dinner.”

  “I’ll be home soon.”

  “Love you,” Simon says. It’s our way of signing off. I echo, fretting that I may sound hollow.

  Fowler is paying the parking fee. He unfolds singles from a clip, then turns to locate me. We’re disheveled, but then everybody is in the heat. Even the parking attendants aren’t ready for it. They swab their brows with their forearms. They open and close car doors with unnecessary force.

  “I won’t call you,” he promises as I get in the car. I can’t look him in the eye. It’s as if I’ve just had my first orgasm. I’m embarrassed, shocked, and overjoyed. And now that I’ve heard Simon’s voice again, I’ve begun to panic. Not that he’ll find out, because I don’t see how he could, but that I can have good sex with two men. I thought there was some law of exclusion. I thought if I ever veered off from Simon for a second, I’d pay in part for my sin with the shame and frustration of not coming. This time, however, despite my nerves, it happened twice for me, the second time slowly, Fowler telling me where he was in it all the while. I didn’t mind his whispering, keeping me posted. He was calling me back, in a way, from the far-off place he used to suggest I disappeared into during sex.

  He leans in and kisses me, his smile fading into the work of the kiss, which makes me want to start up again, as I’m sure he does, to show me, finish things off in a more memorable way. I can’t help comparing them: Simon, a muffled cry, as if he were still in the army barracks he is so loath to talk about, and Fowler, wordy, noisy, then out for the count. We must have slept forty-five minutes. I woke in a sweat, from out of somewhere deep, as if I’d had anesthesia.

  “I want to come back,” I say, praying, Lord, don’t let this back up on me.

  “Please,” Fowler says, his eyes pleased, hopeful. “Please.”

  I go into my bag and give him the photograph of Isaac. Then I pull out of the parking lot. I catch him in the rearview mirror staring down at it, then looking up and exhaling deeply. It’s a moment that strikes me as more intimate than any other of this afternoon, more so than his obvious appraisal of me, élongée, on his couch, than any touch. As I make my way west through the unaccommodating Village streets to 14th, I try to see his face, hear him exactly as he must have sounded just minutes ago, but there is no precision in the image. This has happened to me before: when I become taken with someone I can’t envision the face or recall the voice in the way I thought I heard it. I know there was a fierceness, a power about this afternoon that is unusual. I know that at present I do not regret what I’ve done. And I know that not once did either of us utter the word “love.”

  • • •

  On 79th and Columbus I park at a meter, race to Gillette’s building, and ask the doorman to ring up and see if she’s home. After she answers he hands me the phone.

  “I’ve got Pasquale here. He doesn’t mind if you don’t.”

  Pasquale is the soccer player she mentioned at our last lunch, eight years her junior. “Great.” I hand the house phone back to the doorman, who stows it in a drawer.

  “Seventeen B,” he says, grinning. I feel his gaze all over me as I wait, my back to him, at the elevator bank. He knows. He knows and wouldn’t mind a little of my generosity himself. He’s probably an old hand at this. He obviously thinks I am.

  “You look fabulous!” Gillette says, turning me around to face Pasquale, a compact, leering man with Byronic hair. He’s got on running shorts and nothing else and she’s in her tailored skirt for the office and a tank top. Even he seems to know I’ve cheated. He says “Yes” a lot, and he keeps both hands on Gillette at all times.

  I finally ask her for the shower.

  After telling him to wait, she does an about-face down the hall to the linen closet and then leads me, bearing plush lavender towels, into the guest bathroom. I pull off my terrible clothes.

  “I’m sorry. I’m in an awful rush. I was supposed to be home three hours ago.”

  She searches my face. “What have we been up to, Leigh?”

  “Please,” I tell her. “Just please.” I turn on the water and get in. She holds the curtain open to finish her thought.

  “I see,” she says. “I’ll get you something
to wear. Relax.”

  I wash reluctantly, resenting the duty of having to erase this afternoon that has charged me so. Gillette knocks and enters with a frosted glass containing iced tea with a mint sprig and a long-stemmed silver spoon. She holds up a floral shift from Laura Ashley, tag still on.

  “I hate this. Keep it. It’ll look great on. Leave your clothes here.”

  “Anything,” I say, absorbing the insult. I suck down the iced tea, slip on the dress, my sandals, and my watch. I comb my wet hair in the mirror. “You’re the same,” I tell my reflection after Gillette goes out.

  She and Pasquale are waiting in the den, eager to get to something, it looks like. “Thank you,” I say generally. “I’m sorry for disturbing you.”

  “You’ll call me,” Gillette says at the door. “We owe Barry the chapter on Louis Quatorze before he goes to the Vineyard. That’s August one.”

  Gillette often uses the plural pronoun when discussing dealings with Barry, her editor, although he doesn’t know I’m researching and writing this book for her. “I get so many assignments,” she has said, “he must know I’m farming some of it out.”

  “I’ll call you,” I assure her. I do the continental double kiss with each of them. “ ’Bye.”

  “Bellissima,” Pasquale says behind her, his eyes giving me a happy world where this sort of thing, married folk dropping in for showers after trysts, goes on all the time.

  • • •

  We bought our house, the smallest of four on a woodsy cul-de-sac in Ardsley, on a lifetime plan in the early eighties, when it was still possible for families that didn’t contain at least one doctor or lawyer to do so. Compared to our neighbors, all of whom drive cars with “MD” plates, we are shabby but respectable. Simon’s educational past is less checkered than mine: he has two advanced degrees, M.Phil. and M.B.A., which he earned while his ex-wife interned in Manhattan’s best private hospitals. We aren’t academic-stickers-on-the-station-wagon types (who knows what we’ll become if Isaac lands up at Harvard), but somehow established New York suburbanites can sniff out erudition once they’ve discounted the possibility of any substantial cash flow. Something distinctive has to be on the résumé in order for dinner invitations or club memberships to occur. A friend of Simon’s offered to sponsor us for the country club, but we declined. We couldn’t afford it. “So we attach ourselves to people who have pools,” Simon suggested when Jane and Isaac were feeling the sting from that lost opportunity. “And tennis courts,” he added, as an enticement.

  It’s a split-level white ranch with a two-car garage under the master bedroom and a basketball hoop that Simon and Isaac make a show of using on the weekends. The front lawn is too steep to do anything with except mow. Simon has managed to cultivate a small vegetable garden in the back where, he brags, he grows three two-hundred-dollar tomatoes per year. It’s too shady back there for much volume. But gardening has become a family entertainment. Isaac checks on the plants every morning before he leaves the house. Jane digs around in there with her baking utensils, and Daisy squawks and points and begs to be let free in the dirt. This is where I find them all when I arrive at the house at ten to seven.

  “Mom!” Jane shouts from the hosta bed, seeming to have forgotten my broken promise to her. Isaac surveys me silently, one hand gripping a stake, a figure straight out of Norman Rockwell. Simon has Daisy working beside him at the weeding. He stands up and smiles proudly.

  “She’s got the idea,” he says. “Now I just have to stop her from eating them.”

  I hurry to my youngest to make sure, yes, it’s true, she’s been eating dirt, fistfuls of it. “Oh Lord,” I sigh, so normal, so typical-mom, as Jane would say.

  “She eats worms,” Jane says menacingly, now at my side, waiting for her moments of attention from me.

  “Let me pick her up,” Simon says. “You’ll get your dress dirty.”

  He doesn’t usually notice if I have on a new dress, so this isn’t worrisome until Jane says she likes my dress, where did I get it?

  “Gillette,” I tell her. “She hates it.”

  “Wow,” Jane says, meaning it, fingering the fabric.

  “Mama,” Daisy says, pleased.

  “You look pretty, Mom,” Jane says. And Isaac, who hardly ever looks at me anymore, says, “Yeah, Mom, you do.”

  “I’ve got two steaks, Isaac already ate, the girls can have chicken nuggets, and I can have it all ready by the time you get back from Goody’s if you take the kids with you,” Simon says, begging me with his eyes.

  It’s instant, shedding the self for the others. I’m used to it. “Let me grab a Coke from the fridge and get something else for Daisy to wear.”

  “I’ll get that,” Isaac says. It always shocks me, how far he’ll travel for Daisy, anywhere, it seems, so she’s comfortable. I know he’ll make a terrific father, which is a difficult fact, considering what his own father did.

  “Just a little dress or something,” I say, loving him to bits.

  “I can handle it, Mom.” He’s gone in time to avoid any adoring looks from me and Simon.

  Jane abandons her apothecary’s project in the hosta bed readily and asks permission to go in and get her purse, she has some other things she wants to buy. Simon can’t hide his glee over this, and of course this undermines Jane’s personhood and she has to say so.

  “I’ve had a purse for years, Daddy. You don’t even know I exist.” Then the dramatic exit from garden into the house complete with slamming screen door.

  “It’s the other way around, really,” he whispers to me, grazing my cheek with his lips. “She doesn’t know I exist.”

  “Oh honestly, Simon,” I say, “the sun rises and sets.” Jane was his first baby, and if she had her druthers, he’d be her only parent. The two of them sometimes seem the nucleus of the family, with Isaac, Daisy, and me floating around them in the protoplasm.

  “I’ll open some Brouilly,” he says. “If you hurry, there’ll be a glass left when you get back! What a day!”

  I squeeze his hand in apology. “Thanks.” I can’t go into a long lie about all I had to do in Manhattan today. I leave him for the stormy indoors, where Jane is slamming around in her room, and soon locate the diaper bag and Jane’s Barbie pocketbook.

  “I’ve got it!” I call upstairs. Down she clumps in her leather sandals with heels, teary-faced, and snatches it from me.

  “I was ready to leave hours ago!” she yells. “I wouldn’t have lost it if you were home when you said!”

  I’m relieved to take recrimination from Jane instead of from my husband or Isaac. “Come on,” I say gently. “Let’s get Daisy.”

  “Daisy’s a mess!” Jane cries. But she’s resigned, and we file out. I wipe Daisy’s face, hands, and legs off with baby wipes. Isaac returns with a T-shirt dress he bought her that has his team emblem stenciled in orange on the front. He takes her from her happy perch on Simon’s lap, stands her on the flagstone, and teases her into cooperating with him. She squeals and puckers her face for kissing.

  “Presto change-o,” Isaac says proudly. He carries her like a football to the car.

  “What are they putting in those burgers?” Simon muses.

  I leave him sitting in a lawn chair, where I know we’ll find him asleep when we return.

  Isaac is in the front seat. I cower in anticipation of Jane’s reaction to this fact, but she doesn’t put up another fuss, just installs herself grumpily beside Daisy’s car seat in the back. Isaac smirks. “Forget the steaks, Mom. Simon’s not gonna deliver.”

  “I know. He was sitting in his chair.”

  Even Jane laughs over this. “Daddy’s really tired,” she explains. “He kept asking us if we wanted to eat dinner. He asked us, like, five hundred times.”

  “No, she doesn’t exaggerate,” Isaac groans.

  By now, we’re back on the parkway, heading north.

  “Shut up, Isaac,” Jane orders. “You’re a waste of skin.”

  As horrible an image as th
is calls up for me, I think it’s funny. “Where did you hear that one, my darling girl?” I ask her.

  “From Isaac, of course,” she says. “He said it about me. So now I’m saying it about him. An eye for an eye, right?”

  • • •

  The clerk at customer service surveys me with a frown he wears like a too-tight hat, defying me to find a copy of Jules and Jim at any store on the planet, offering his empty palms as evidence of my ridiculous request, this from a woman carrying a child with most of one hand stuffed in her mouth. How could I possibly care about esoteric film when I’m saddled with such common responsibilities?

  “What did you expect from a guy with a flat-top and a fade?”’ Isaac whines. “You think he’s gonna know from films, let alone French ones?”

  “I prefer not to think so categorically,” I say. Teach them what you know, I read somewhere. And I know that if I assume that men of twenty or so who have chosen to doctor their hair in such a manner know nothing about the films of Europe, then I am a bigot.

  “Me neither,” Isaac admits, smirking. He hands me a CD of the Stones’ Goats’ Head Soup, which was popular when Pam and I were dancing around our room in ski boots, the tune of choice being “Heartbreaker.” Jane skips up with her 10,000 Maniacs tape and one by Madonna. Then they want to go off to the Nintendo corner while I stand in line.

  “Go,” I tell them. “Destroy some cities. Solve some mysteries.” They love it when I support their every endeavor.

  It is hopeless in this environment to try to hang onto the glamour of secret, good sex, but I’m in line at Sam Goody with Fowler’s hands all over me, his mouth at my ear. I put our purchases on the counter, produce my Amex card, and smile mechanically at the cashier, another young man with the hairdo of our uninformed clerk. “Get him to smile at you,” Fowler whispers. “Do anything.”

  He hands me my package and looks for the next customer. I flinch at the idea of my doing something to make him smile, then I go back into the cavernous store to locate my children, whom I find in front of two adjacent screens, both very excited over their conquests. Simon and I have not succumbed to household Nintendo, mostly because his computer wizardry provides all of the destructive and competitive options offered by a Nintendo setup.