I’m not playing this game, she thought, stunned for a moment. I am not playing this!
She turned back to the computer, fighting down her anger and despair. Goddamn him for doing this to her! Gregg knew goddamn well that writing time—between nine and eleven P.M.—was her time; they’d discussed this, agreed on it five years ago when they moved back to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania from Los Angeles where they had spent nearly a decade. And he still violated this sacred privacy, this intimate moment of creation whenever he got on one of his tirades. Usually the tirade went something like this: whenever she was deep into the first draft of a novel or a really crackerjack short story, she tended to block everything out and not think of anything else. When that happened she tended to get...well, a little scatterbrained. When she wasn’t actually sitting down and writing, she was thinking about the piece she was writing; how to approach it, plot developments, characterization. She wasn’t in a dream-state the way she was while writing, but she tended to daydream at times. And when that happened, when she got that deep into her work, she was slow to respond. As simple as that.
She’d tried explaining this to Gregg—they’d even discussed it and tried to work through it in therapy a few years ago. And while they’d made important strides in their relationship since therapy, this was the one little thing Gregg still couldn’t let go of. He knew goddamn well her writing was important to her, but he still went out of his way to demean her with little snide remarks about her ‘hearing’.
It depressed and angered her because, while he didn’t come right out and say it, she suspected the reason he did this was to remind her he’d given up his dream of being an actor when Eric was conceived. She hadn’t asked him to; she’d encouraged him to keep his agent and continue auditioning for parts, but he’d insisted. I have a degree in computer science, he’d explained that spring day in 1994 when she’d told him she was pregnant. It’s about time I do something with it, especially now that we’re going to have a family. She’d tried to talk him out of it; she knew he had gotten the degree because his father had pressured him to obtain it. He had paid for Gregg’s education on the condition he get a degree in something that would lead to gainful employment; Business Administration, Computer Science, something like that, he’d said. In other words, follow in my footsteps. Be like me because that’s the safe route. And while there were genuine merits in following such a path, Elizabeth knew that a lifetime in a corporate office behind a computer wasn’t Gregg’s lifework. Acting and working in film and theatre was where his heart lay. And he’d packed it all in the minute Elizabeth became pregnant.
She’d never asked him to give up his dream.
She wasn’t going to let this latest episode deter her. It was ten-thirty; Eric was in bed sound asleep and Gregg was...well, usually by this time, Gregg was in bed himself. He usually turned in between ten and ten-thirty, sometimes eleven if there was something good on TV. He’d come upstairs from the living room to rub the salt in her wound, so he was watching some program on TV probably. She wasn’t going to be tricked into going downstairs to try to mend the bridges over the troubled waters of this one sore spot in their marriage. She had a deadline and he knew it. Besides, she’d learned long ago that trotting after him following a fight that was a result of the so-called hearing problem only resulted in her rolling over to his demands. She’d nod and agree that, yes, there was something wrong with her hearing; she’d go to the doctor and have it checked. That would shut him up for awhile, and of course she wouldn’t go to the doctor. If Gregg had his way she’d cease to write. Or maybe she’d work in the dead of night, between one and three a.m. when he was asleep.
That would be just like him, she thought, trying to get back into the story. Much as she didn’t want to believe it, she sometimes had the feeling Gregg wished she would be a normal wife; one who cooked, cleaned, took care of Eric, did the shopping, and held down a full-time job to pay her half of the mortgage and bills. Oh yeah, and spreading her legs and swallowing were also important. Can’t forget that.
The tears sprang to her eyes suddenly without warning at that last thought and Elizabeth fought them back. If she continued down this track he would win. It wasn’t her fault he’d abandoned his lifework; it wasn’t her fault she’d stuck to her dream, which was writing fiction. She’d managed to work her day job, be a mother, and work at building her dream. True, the writing time had shrunk from twenty or thirty hours a week to a mere ten, but she still put her time in and the effort had paid off: three published novels and over fifty published short stories, plus two major awards for her work. Not bad for an hour or two of writing every night.
She gained control of her emotions and sat up straight in her chair, focusing her mind back on her work. She was able to get back into the narrative flow after scrolling back a few pages and rereading what she had written. She revised a little as she went along, then got back into it. Within a minute she was deep into the narrative and she wrapped up her page quota fifteen minutes later, adding a few notes to herself at the end of the page for tomorrow’s writing. Then she saved the file to a zip disk and debated on whether she should check her e-mail. She glanced at the clock. It was a quarter till eleven. It wouldn’t hurt to see if anything had come in. She wouldn’t get to her e-mail again until four o’clock tomorrow afternoon at the earliest and it would be filled up by then. She launched her Internet connection and logged onto her e-mail account to see what was there.
There wasn’t much. A few bits of spam, a chatty e-mail from an old writer friend she had known back from The Horror Show days where the two of them had first been published at the beginning of their careers. She skimmed the e-mail quickly, making a note to herself to read and respond to it at length tomorrow afternoon when she got home from work. There was another e-mail from an on-line bookseller asking if he could ship a box of her new short story collection, which had just been published in paperback, to her home for her to sign; she had agreed to participate in a promotion for the bookseller a few months before, and she quickly sent a reply saying he could send the books. There was another e-mail from a small press publisher asking if she had anything she could send him for his press—he’d simply be honored to publish a book of hers in a limited edition. She saved that e-mail, making a note to not only read it over again, but to visit the publisher’s website to research the books he’d previously published.
When she was finished she closed her Internet connection, then closed down her computer. Then she headed to the bedroom, noting that Gregg was still downstairs watching TV. She went to the bathroom, peed and washed her hands, then got into bed. Tomorrow was Friday, and two of her American Lit classes had exams tomorrow and she had a lesson planned for her composition class for fourth period. It would be a full day of work. No writing tomorrow night, either. Friday nights were family nights.
Family nights. She lay in bed, thinking about her family. She loved Gregg dearly; he was her friend, her lover, her confidant. She couldn’t think of spending her life with any other man. But he drove her batshit at times with his mood swings. Gregg worked as a senior analyst at an insurance company in Lancaster, and his days were usually spent in meetings and crunching formulas for databases and writing programs for whatever it was their system was built on. His salary was almost twice as much as what she earned as a high school teacher, and his job was much more stressful. She understood that, and she tried to give him the space he needed. They gave as much time as they could to Eric, and she supposed the time left over should be given to each other but it wasn’t. That was the one thing sorely lacking in their marriage lately.
Spending time with each other. As a couple.
It had been two years since they’d gone away together for the weekend. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d made love.
Before she knew it she was crying.
She tried not to make her sobs too audible. The tears trickled down her cheeks silently. She loved Gregg, she really did. But sometimes he didn’
t take the time out to understand her. In the early years of their relationship and marriage, she thought he did. He’d loved the fact that she was a writer — her credentials, as amateurish as they’d sounded to her at the time, had impressed the hell out of him. And of course he was a burgeoning actor, with a few credits as an extra for some major films and one starring role in a student film that had gained incredible critical acclaim at the time of its release. He’d supported her morally through the sale of her first novel to a British publisher ten years ago, then through the lean years when the book failed to find an American audience. It had only been within the last four years when her agent, Michelle Greenberg, had successfully started to place her work with a small paperback house in New York that he’d started to show both disinterest and disapproval with her work. He’d started complaining about the time she put into her writing, which was much less than it had been before Eric was born. Early in their relationship she’d written to the point of obsession; two hours a night, four hours or more on Saturday and Sunday. In the early years when they’d had Eric, he’d been very supportive of her work: taking Eric out to give her an hour or so at the computer, taking up some of the chores so she could get some writer-related job done. Then they’d worked out the schedule she held now, two hours at night after nine p.m., and every other weekend she had four hours on a Saturday or Sunday. And things had worked fine.
Until lately.
Now she felt like a teenager sneaking around to smoke a cigarette when it came to writing. It had become like masturbation, something to be done in private lest she be made to feel shameful. And Gregg’s behavior had grown increasingly schizophrenic when it came to her writing. One minute he was telling her she wasn’t paying enough attention to him, telling her he was sick of her talking about her writing (she hadn’t talked about her work to him in years, yet he still brought up this lament), then the next moment he was complaining she never talked to him about her work or let him read it (and whenever that came out she wanted to scream at him and when I do bring it up you complain about it so why should I fucking talk to you about it?). It was so frustrating to hear it—she was literally at the end of her rope. She attended conventions by herself, and the few writer friends she had who lived in the area she visited alone. He complained about that too; “It’s like I don’t know you anymore,” he told her one evening when the subject crept up six months ago. “You have your friends and the things you do, and I have mine. And we don’t do things together anymore.”
Elizabeth sobbed silently, knowing this was sadly true. In the beginning they did everything together. They had the same interests—actually, they still shared the same interests and hobbies—but they pursued them on separate tracks now. Gregg was very creative, was very talented, and she knew that part of himself was screaming to be let out and she just wished he would indulge in it, but he wouldn’t. She’d told him countless times she would take Eric while tried out for a play—she knew he could get any part he tried for—but he never took her up on her offers. He had let his dreams die and had been trying to destroy hers now for the last five years.
Now they led separate, almost single lives, living under the same roof.
Elizabeth sobbed, trying to control her crying. She wasn’t crying loud enough for Gregg to hear her. If he did he would surely come up. She didn’t want him to come up, though. She didn’t want him to know she’d been crying because she didn’t want to talk about why she had the sickening feeling that their marriage was dying.
“WHAT DO YOU think of this?” Laura Baker had her finger set in the open page of a cookbook she was reading and she looked over the kitchen counter at her daughter. “The recipe calls for fresh basil and oregano, but I’m not sure if— ”
“Let me see.” Elizabeth set down the latest issue of People magazine, which she’d been perusing casually on the kitchen table, and walked over to where her mother was standing in the kitchen. They’d been talking about preparing some baked ziti, and while Elizabeth had a recipe at home, her mother had found this particular recipe in a new cookbook she’d picked up at the Fire Hall fund raiser last month. She looked down at the cookbook and nodded. “Yep, that’s identical to my recipe. We can do that easily.”
“Okay, fine,” Laura said, flipping the page. “That’s what we’ll do then.”
Elizabeth smiled. The subject was closed as far as her mother was concerned. When mom got it in her head to make a certain dish for whatever event she was planning, she usually didn’t budge.
Elizabeth had left school right at the three o’clock bell and headed straight home. She’d responded to some e-mails, did some research on the publisher who asked if she had anything he could publish and decided she would allow him to have limited edition hardcover rights to her next novel — whenever Michelle got around to selling paperback rights for it. Then she’d headed to her mother’s to pick up Eric. Her mom picked Eric up from school on Friday’s and sat for him until five or so, giving Elizabeth an hour or two to get some business taken care of and some housecleaning done before Gregg came home. Eric was outside playing with the Sullivan twins and Elizabeth had told him they’d be leaving shortly. Elizabeth and her mom had been chatting about what had been going on in their lives the past week—the usual stuff—and then Mom mentioned that Ronnie’s new girlfriend, Diana Marshfield, was finally moving out from Ohio.
“Oh, it’s this weekend?” Elizabeth asked.
“Yes,” Laura answered, starting the dishes in the sink. “Ronnie left this morning for Ohio to help her pack the truck, and they’re supposed to leave tomorrow morning and get back by the afternoon. That’s why I thought I’d make something for them here.”
Elizabeth nodded, knowing exactly what her mother was talking about. She’d want her son and his new girlfriend to have a nice home cooked meal when they arrived, and she also wanted to make Diana’s arrival a welcome one. After all, the woman was uprooting from her life in Columbus, Ohio, where she’d been born and raised, and was starting a new life in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Gregg had received the same welcome when they’d first started dating twelve years ago. “So he’s really going through with it,” she said.
“Yep, he sure is,” Laura said. Elizabeth knew from the tone of her mother’s voice what she meant by that.
Elizabeth’s father, Jerry, had already expressed his disapproval of the developments in Ronnie’s life months before. These pronouncements were always made when Ronnie was at work and when Mary, Ronnie’s daughter, was outside playing, or with her mother, and Elizabeth always happened to be around when he made them. Elizabeth agreed with her father’s opinion on the situation; she, too, felt her brother was rushing into the relationship too quickly.
Ronald Baker was thirty-seven years old, three years younger than Elizabeth, and, until this weekend, he and Mary had been living with her parents. Three years before, Ronnie had moved out of the small two bedroom duplex he had been living in since his wife, Cindy, left him for another man. He and Mary had moved into Laura and Jerry’s house so Ronnie could pay down some bills, and Elizabeth predicted that the “few months” Ronnie proposed would turn into “a few years” and she was right. Ronnie and Mary lived with Laura and Jerry for three years rent-free. Then Ronnie met Diana through some Internet dating service and things changed drastically.
It had started innocently enough. Ronnie never talked about his girlfriends, so it was months before anybody knew he was seeing Diana. He’d asked Laura one morning if she could watch Mary for the weekend; he was going to Ohio. When Laura asked why he was going to Ohio he’d answered, “I’m meeting somebody there.” When pressed on the issue, Ronnie had grudgingly admitted he was going to Ohio to see a woman. He’d later admitted he’d met her on the Internet.
At first Elizabeth had been amused by the incident. She’d never known her brother to troll for women on the Internet. He’d always met his girlfriends at the local bars or at parties. He’d met Cindy at the Cocalico Tavern, and the few girlfriends he�
��d had after the breakup and divorce were women he’d met at other bars. But with the acquisition of a new computer a year before, Ronnie spent the time he wasn’t working and playing with Mary in their parent’s basement on the Internet. And what kind of websites does a thirty-something recovering alcoholic-drug addict who has just been through a divorce usually find most attractive?
Elizabeth approved of Ronnie having a long distance affair; what she didn’t approve of was her brother’s sudden plans to have a house built and move Diana and her two children in with him, settling into a sense of domestic bliss. She and mom had talked about this constantly in the months during the building of the house. “I think he’s making a mistake,” Elizabeth had said one day during one of her afternoon visits when the two women were alone together. “Going from a divorce right into another relationship. Hell, he didn’t even play the field that much when he was living with you guys. He should have done that for a little bit but he didn’t. And Diana...I mean, yeah, I think its fine to have a long distance affair, but they’re rushing into it. At least they’re not getting married.”
And that’s when her mother had told her what she’d found one afternoon when she had cleaned Ronnie’s room: unpaid credit card bills and letters demanding payment; credit card receipts from Ohio for dinners at expensive restaurants; and a credit card slip for Gordon’s Jewelers for two thousand dollars. The latter was for a diamond engagement ring. Elizabeth had been flabbergasted not only at the price, but the willingness with which Ronnie had bought the ring. When he and Cindy had gotten married they’d been poor—Cindy’s wedding ring had cost Ronnie two hundred dollars and it had been a beautiful wedding band cut with small diamonds. Cindy hadn’t been the type of woman to pester Ronnie for something gaudy anyway, and Ronnie was notoriously cheap when it came to spending money on family. The only person Ronnie wasn’t cheap with was Mary; he showered his daughter with gifts at every available opportunity.
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