Off and on, since Ishiguro alerted me to Pacer Rosengrant’s return, since I met Pacer Rosengrant in my bedroom, I’d entertained both the possibility that I was overreacting, as well as the possibility I wasn’t reacting enough. Perhaps perspective on the situation was what I lacked most conspicuously. I needed a voice of reason, or at least objective, disembodied words. So I closed the laptop and texted my old student Ari Marks, the journalist. The last time he and I talked, Izzy’s and my relationship was going well. We’d just gotten married. Ari was putting his piece about the sommelier and her new restaurateur husband for Daley Machine to bed. It was difficult to imagine having to say that things were fucked up, that I’d found Pacer Rosengrant in our bed and, now, on Izzy’s BlackBerry so short a time thereafter.
I think Izzy’s cheating on me, I typed. Call to discuss.
Ari rung me an hour or so later. An editorial meeting awaited him in a conference room, but he wanted to talk anyway. “What happened?” he asked.
I told him what I knew, up to the point of the morning following the department party. “Wow,” Ari said, as though scandalized. I heard clanging, then rustling. “Sorry. I’m eating a Clif Bar.” He partially muffled his crinkling. “How did Izzy take your finding the guy?”
I already felt like a loser for revealing this much. I wished we weren’t having this conversation and were, instead, trading anecdotes about the ineptitude of his columnist colleagues and my students and the analogous poverty of their intellects, like we used to. I’d give anything to have unflattering scenes of gracelessness and missteps that I committed on Internet dates for him once again, instead of this.
“Well,” I began, “that’s the thing. I didn’t actually tell her I found him.”
Ari was aghast. “You didn’t say anything?”
I shook my head, but then remembered he, on the phone, couldn’t see me. “No,” I had to say to fill the space. “I mean, I haven’t found the guy here again or anything, but now I’m suspicious of everything. Her behavior has been very . . . textbook. Absences, evasiveness, distraction, aphoristic speech.” On the verge of tears, I told Ari about the downloaded e-mails and BlackBerry messages waiting to reveal everything, there on my MacBook, beckoning, taunting. It was almost as though Izzy were daring me to catch her.
Ari paused for a moment. I could hear him typing something. Then he said, “Well, you have to start reading.”
“The texts?”
“The texts, the e-mails, everything.”
“I don’t know.”
“How do you not know?”
“Because I never wanted to turn into that guy. The jealous, possessive, spying type. That’s not me.”
“Professor, don’t be a fucking idiot. You have to see the evidence before you make any pronouncements. Would you have let me get away with a move like this in a short story draft for workshop? The character wants the reader to give a shit about his being cheated on, he needs some proof.”
“You’re right.”
“You’re goddamn right I’m right.”
Even with Ari’s convincing exegetic argument, I still felt like it was wrong to invade. At the same time, I couldn’t say at that moment I trusted Izzy, either. No matter what emotional and platonic excuses I wanted to generate on her behalf, no matter how hard I tried to put it out of my mind, ever since my wife had brought another man into our Rabbi Ethan Allen–sanctified marital bed, I only thought the worst. And that was her fault. Her treachery alone had to justify my incursion.
This wasn’t the first time in my life I’d suspected someone I was in love with of cheating on me. I thought something was going on when I dated Sydney and she started hanging out with Greg, her summer-job doorman. It was before our senior year of high school. She revealed that fall she’d smoked pot with him and slept with him once when he worked the overnight shift and came upstairs “hungry.” In undergrad, there was a point I started to feel like my girlfriend Amy’s new engineering major friend Christos Utrecht from the Honors College was someone more than just an acquaintance with whom she was starting a “literary magazine.” A Neil Young show at Mandel Hall she secretly attended with him during a long weekend I’d gone back to New York confirmed it. I’d never told her I knew about that concert. I never let on that I was aware of the saved drafts of letters she’d been writing him, which I’d found on her old IBM. Unsummoned, she never confessed. And most recently, Talia. I sensed, before anyone informed me, that she’d taken up with someone else, and he turned out to be her indie-rock idiot. All of this was more experience than I cared to admit I had. It had left me with the unfortunate and sobering knowledge that once enough pall-casting doubt amassed between two people, there was never any redemption. It was much like when TCA bacteria infiltrated a wine cork, which then corrupted the entire bottle. Izzy often got Vintage Attraction guests with questions on the subject. Whether or not consumers realized it, one out of every ten bottles plugged with a natural closure was affected. It didn’t take a lot of the trichloroanisole compound to “cork” wine and make it taste like wet newspaper. Mere parts per million—a drop in a swimming pool—and humans could detect it. Even those without professional noses. Besides, we were way beyond misunderstanding here. Though Izzy had been conveniently absent at the high-thread-count unveiling, I’d still found Pacer Rosengrant in our bed. It didn’t matter whether he’d just fallen asleep there shirtless and alone after an arduous night of blind-tasting wines at the Biscuit Lofts as he’d claimed, or if between those hemstitched linen sheets he’d committed actual adultery with my beleaguered spouse. Either way, it was pretty fucking bad. Comportment was out the window. We were operating under martial marital law now.
I pressed ahead through the downloaded files. I faintly hoped I’d uncover evidence here that Pacer Rosengrant’s interest in my wife was simply a professional one. I wouldn’t even have minded learning that her involvement with him amounted to nothing more serious than just one of those stupid phases when someone relegated to the far reaches of romantic nostalgia manages to insinuate himself into the present moment. I’d recently weathered a Talia crisis of conscience. If Izzy’s liaison with Pacer had turned chronology momentarily on its head, it wouldn’t have necessarily concluded that she’d permanently damaged trajectory—our trajectory.
When I reached the text messages received over the past weeks she’d imported, I discovered what Pacer Rosengrant wanted wasn’t merely to learn about wines from an accomplished industry professional. I now had the data to correct certain crucial recent misperceptions. When she’d sat beside me, not paying attention to the important Swedish film I’d Netflixed—too tired to read the subtitles, she claimed—but alert enough to react when the BlackBerry buzzed, and then respond to a line of text with another she clicked out, touch-typing furiously with two thumbs, it wasn’t Chef Dominique who’d contacted her. When we were at brunch and she said she was letting her coffee cool down before drinking it—ten minutes after it was served—hands and eyes in her lap, they were the words of Pacer Rosengrant that had invaded.
Wut r the subdistricts of rioja
i kno ur at brunch but i need to see u n study
w/service ok it’s theory that fucks me up
i miss u taste smell my hands all over u body
yes i am serious said service not a prob lol
im just gonna sit here n stroke throbben cock til u answer
How was she able to read this shit and eat peanut butter and banana pancakes? How could she talk about the honey that was too thick on the biscuits with Pacer Rosengrant sexting her lap? How could she tell me she had a headache from the night before while she was getting these subliterate linguistic lures and I ordered her another Bloody Mary? How could she sit there and field this fuckalogue and patronizingly agree with my unoriginal and likely flawed analysis of Bergman’s contributions to cinema’s auteur period? It was staggering.
That evening, I
discovered Izzy’s BlackBerry pressing uncomfortably against my spine between the couch cushions. Not even caring enough to take the thing with her was yet even more evidence of her baffling late-onset heedlessness. But it gave me an opportunity to conduct a more thorough investigation of her private digital life. I spied pointlessly on group gluten-free-reservation alerts from Chris at the bistro, address book entries belonging to no one I didn’t already know. I paged through the camera-phone album. Each frame I advanced compounded the panic over what I might turn up. I feared a picture that would expose just how much more serious an entanglement with Pacer Rosengrant existed for Izzy than I realized. But the shots weren’t incriminating. The reel was mostly wine labels and portraits of me from our festival trips. Perhaps fortunately, perhaps unfortunately, I found in the device nothing beyond words to render additionally damning what Pacer Rosengrant’s sexts so eloquently limned.
She’d been filming today, which meant a Citron and soda or two at Mamacita’s or The Lodge would follow the wrap. Izzy found solace in the lack of artifice and warmth at these neighborhood joints. The Spanish she didn’t understand was a welcome contrast to the all-too-comprehensible noise above our apartment, her putative reason for needing to stay away from here for as long as she could. But it was getting late.
Izzy came in an hour later looking like a Kabuki character, still in her studio makeup. She had on black mascara, which simultaneously narrowed and enlarged her eyes. Her skin had a foundation of plaster. Her lips were painted a deep garnet. Offstage, wearing this much on her face was absurd, especially when juxtaposed with her vintage gray-and-silver Chanel embroidered silk dress and black cashmere sweater. Yet the presentation was strangely, alarmingly, alluring. At a moment I didn’t even want to be in the same room she inhabited, I couldn’t think of anybody I wanted to fuck more.
“So that’s where that was.”
I was holding the BlackBerry. It was encased in a protective, dark watermelon–colored plastic overlay, which I’d bought her. I hadn’t reflexively ditched it when I heard her key in the lock. I hadn’t even tried to hide it behind a pillow on the couch where I sat. My thumb twitched over the trackball. She caught me red-handed, literally. I’d predicted it was going to end up exactly like this the moment I picked up the thing.
“Izzy, I know you’ve been seeing Pacer Rosengrant.”
She squinted as though I was a flickering image. But there was no shortage of clarity in the room. Light bounced off of the windows, black with night on the other side. The glow heightened the convenience store sensation. With a formidable intake of breath, she respired her olfactory mucosa, which elevated snot into her brain. I suspected that illicit trafficked agents had spent the better part of the night up there colluding with her latent lower-minded impulses.
“Do you have to have every fucking bulb in the house lit up?” She hated when I didn’t keep the place dark. She often commented on feeling like a suspect in an interrogation room. Each month, she scoffed about the electric bill.
“I was trying to read.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
“Did you fuck him?”
“Do you really think I’d do something like that?”
The truth was I had no idea. “When I found him here, he said nothing was going on.”
She seemed to hear this as though information she already knew. Pacer Rosengrant must have tipped her off about the encounter. “Well, nothing was going on,” she said carefully, her tone betraying nothing.
I still imagined a lie-detector needle going crazy, spraying its scroll with hostile ink, after absorbing a blatantly false statement. “What’s with the texts, then? He obviously is less interested in theory for his Court exam than he is in practicing with you. What’s he even doing back in Chicago?”
She sat down beside me. Apparently she was not at all concerned with maintaining confrontation distance. “Hapworth, have you never been with someone who had . . . that kind of hold on you?”
“He’s such a loser, Izzy. You’re the one who’s important. You’re the one who’s sought after. He’s never going to pass the rest of that exam. He’s a hack. I read the Yelp reviews of that Vegas place. An assistant wine director who showed some promise once but is so in love with himself and his fantasy of being a master sommelier that he can’t even work the floor or put together a decent list.”
“Are you sure you’re not describing yourself?”
I was stricken. “Is that how you see me? I’m not in love with myself.”
“You stop caring just when you’re supposed to start doing. I’ve never seen you once prepare for a class or actually read a student’s paper you graded.”
“Part of me has never cared about teaching. What’s the point in caring when nothing comes of it?”
“Well, when you really care about something, you’re not done after three sentences. You can’t just throw it away and move on to the next thing. People lock themselves into your brain. Whether or not your experiences with them were good or bad is irrelevant. Once they’re there, they’re there. So, yes, rationally, logically, I should be able to walk away from him. I should have walked away long before I met you. And I did, in a way.”
“But?”
“But he came back. He showed up. I wasn’t planning it.”
“You aren’t the same person you were when you dated him.”
I’d been speaking to the Stil de grain yellow rug that underlay the coffee table, and now lifted my head. Ishiguro had come over and sat before me. He stared in my direction. Though the dog just bore the solemn expression he always did, his eyes and pout seemed imbued with deeper melancholy. I imagined this was how Casshole felt when his parents fought. Scott and Sheryl were uncharacteristically quiet tonight, probably with their sensationalistic pierced ears to water glasses.
I turned to Izzy. She was busy with the BlackBerry she’d reclaimed. I asked, “So what about me?”
She spoke to the device’s small screen. “Come on, Hapworth.”
“No, seriously, Isabelle. If things were really so good between us, you wouldn’t have been so weak to Pacer Rosengrant’s surfeit of charm and pleasing aesthetics.”
She looked up at me, like I’d said something terrible. “You never call me Isabelle.”
I tried to laugh. I put an arm around her, which she didn’t reject. “I just wish you’d be honest with me.”
“I wish you’d drink with me.”
“Fine. Make me something. I’ll have what she’s having.”
She excused herself to the bathroom—“To get out of this armor,” she said—and Ishiguro and I watched her advance down the hall until the vantage offered her no longer. I couldn’t help imagining her going to fortify her flickering vodka buzz with a couple of lines. The pug climbed onto the couch. Likely he was endeavoring to distract me from my cynicism. He positioned himself in my lap. Then he stood upright, and with a paw on each shoulder to balance himself, set about licking my face. He painted with his tongue rapidly, in sweeping strokes. I kept turning in the direction opposite the dog’s focus in order to keep from being suffocated. Barely able to speak, I asked Ishiguro, “Are you happy? Do I give you a good life?” The dog’s face was almost completely upstaged by his propeller tongue. He was undeterred by the question, and kept on licking, perhaps by way of response.
Izzy’s return signaled the conclusion of Ishiguro’s facial. Her opening of bottles and slamming of ice cubes into shakers chased the pug into the kitchen to seek cocktail hour amuse-bouche. For some reason, she was still wearing the clothes she’d left to take off.
She presented me shortly with an amply filthy dirty martini. I took an immodest sip. It occurred to me that by drinking it I was forgetting to perform crucial parts of my recently developed and in progress improv sketch.
“I have to go e-mail my attendance list. And grade some papers.”
She was
angling for the place between the dog and me on the couch. “It’s okay. You don’t have to keep me company.” She looked genuinely disappointed.
I didn’t move to exit right away. Instead I continued to sit beside her, drink in hand. She sipped hers and scanned cable channels. She advanced past each offering without even considering it. It was as though her flipping was just an exercise for her thumb. I hated to have to keep pretending to be a teacher. I’d hoped I was leaving academia behind when I walked out of Shelley Schultz’s office.
I finished half of the martini. This, I figured, was a fair compromise. I kissed Izzy on the cheek, gathered the MacBook from the breakfast bar, and took it to the guest bedroom. While the computer booted, I withdrew a stack of essays from the desk drawer. These were final papers I’d collected at the close of an earlier semester, without any intention of reading or handing back. I’d forgotten I still had them until recently. Now they served as props to perpetuate the myth that I was employed. I could still taste brininess in my mouth. I longed to finish the glass I’d abandoned. No matter what you wanted to say about Izzy, her power to compose and execute flawless cocktails, almost rivaling her dexterity in wine, could never be shaken. But I needed to remain in control of my inhibitions. I sensed I’d drunk too much on an empty stomach when I contemplated just telling Izzy everything I’d been hiding. I felt like such a hypocrite railing about her deceit. I’d probably trumped her, if not in magnitude, in number of concealments: what had almost transpired with Talia, what had happened on campus to my job. Even what I was doing right now instead of grading papers. I had an unlocked folder of images open on the computer. I’d appropriated the pictures from Facebook. They depicted some of my female student “friends” in salacious poses of alcohol-fomented informality. I hadn’t jerked off much over the years. I hadn’t done it at all since moving in with Izzy. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even felt the need to before I got fired.
She came in. She found me with my jeans pushed down my legs to the floor. My dick stuck through the hole in my trout boxers. Izzy asked, “This is what you call grading?”
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