When she set both boys back down on the ground, she looked up at Andy and tried to read what she saw in his eyes. Fear, distrust, resentment, pain, longing. She wasn’t sure what he felt for her anymore, or what she did, as she put her arms around him, and kissed his cheek.
“How was your flight?” he asked her.
“Long” was all she could think of to answer, as they walked along with her bags on a cart. Wendy watched her as she and Tom followed at a distance. She wondered how Stephanie was going to handle the complicated currents that lay ahead. She and Tom were walking to the cab stand together, and Tom whispered to her.
“I’m glad I’m not him. He’s got a nasty surprise ahead.” Stephanie’s affair with Gabriel was no secret to them. Only Andy didn’t know what was in store. It made them both feel awkward when they said goodbye to her. She introduced them to Andy, who nodded and smiled and asked them how they’d enjoyed Paris, and they tried not to sound overly enthusiastic, as a compassionate gesture to him. Stephanie hugged Wendy and promised to call her, and kissed Tom on the cheek and wished him luck with his housekeeping and he laughed.
“You have no idea how much there is to do. I’ll be scrubbing and throwing things in a Dumpster for the next two weeks. I should probably move.”
They walked outside together, as Stephanie and Andy and the boys headed for the garage with her bags. She kept up a constant stream of conversation with Aden and Ryan but she and Andy had hardly spoken to each other since she arrived. She didn’t know what to say and she was afraid he would see something in her eyes. She hated lying to him, but she felt she had no other choice. And worst of all, she felt loyal to Gabriel now, but seeing Andy, she realized that as his wife, she owed him a great deal too. She felt torn in half, and fell silent on the drive home, as the boys screamed and yelled and chortled in their car seats in the back seat, while Andy didn’t say a word. She wondered if he knew.
It took them forty minutes to get to their house, and as Stephanie walked in, she felt a tidal wave sweep over her, as though she’d been lost at sea for a month, and had just been washed back on shore at home. Yet part of her didn’t want to be here, and wanted to be with Gabriel in Paris, not in San Francisco in the house in the Upper Haight.
Everything looked neat and tidy when she walked in, and Stephanie realized Andy had made a superhuman effort to get it all cleaned up for her. She was sure it hadn’t looked that way while she was gone.
“The house looks great,” she said to Andy with a smile.
“Thank you,” he said quietly, and she was suddenly reminded of how cold and angry he had been when she left. Nothing seemed to have improved, and there was suddenly a chasm between them that she had no idea how to bridge, or if she should try. She didn’t want to mislead him, nor tell him the truth in the next six weeks, and it was going to be a juggling act while Gabriel was there, trying to spend time with him. She had a knot in her stomach thinking about it, as she walked into their bedroom, and put down her purse and coat, while Andy carried in her two big bags, one of them mostly filled with toys and clothes for the boys. She had bought a sweater for Andy on sale, but nothing else. She had already divorced him in her mind while she was gone. And now she was back and he was real.
“Do you want something to eat?” Andy asked her, as though he didn’t know what else to say to her. She shook her head.
“No, I’m fine. We ate a lot on the plane.” It had taken eleven and a half hours to get home, and she’d been too nervous to sleep.
She opened one of the bags and took out what she’d bought for the boys and brought it to their room. They loved the toys, and she left the clothes on a chair, to hang them up later, and hugged them both again. They had grown in the past month. And then she went back to her room, took out the sweater for Andy, and laid it on the bed. It seemed a meager offering for his taking care of their two boys for the four weeks that she’d been gone. He walked into the room then, and she looked up at him, trying not to see the question in his eyes. Everything felt off between them, as though they were strangers living at the same address. She couldn’t resurrect her feelings for him.
“The boys look great,” she said quietly.
“Aden had a cold last week, but he’s fine now.” He had told her on the phone, but they were both groping for words in the awkwardness between them.
“It feels good to be home,” she said, feeling like a liar, but she didn’t know what else to say. She handed him the sweater and it was too small. He was taller and wider than she remembered. How could he become so unfamiliar in four short weeks? But she had filled them with another man.
He disappeared from the room then and left the sweater on the bed, while she unpacked her bags. She didn’t see him for the next two hours, when he came back and said dinner was ready. The boys clattered downstairs from their room, where she could tell from the doorway they’d made a mess, and Andy had set the table and made hamburgers on the barbecue, with frozen French fries and a salad. The boys’ favorite meal. It felt like she’d never left. Or like only her ghost had returned. She felt like a prisoner here. She couldn’t even pretend that it was nice to be back. She missed the bistro down the street from the apartment, the friends she’d made in the last month, the streets and buildings of Paris, and Gabriel’s arms around her while he told her everything would be fine. She had promised to text him when she arrived, but she hadn’t yet. She’d been afraid to turn on her phone, and didn’t want Andy to see his texts. She was going to read them later, and answer him when she was alone. She hadn’t done it before dinner because she was afraid that Andy would walk in and ask her who she was texting. Just being in the house with him seemed like a lie. She had built a whole new life in Paris, or planned it, and now she had flown backward in time.
The boys provided ample conversation during dinner, and Stephanie helped Andy clean up afterward. He turned on the TV in the den, and watched a basketball game, and she went upstairs to give the boys their bath and put them to bed. Andy came up when she called him to kiss them good night, and then she found herself alone with him in their bedroom, with all the awkwardness between them, and he looked at her and closed the door so the boys wouldn’t hear them.
“Something’s wrong, Steph, isn’t it? It feels weird between us now.” She couldn’t deny it, but she didn’t want to admit it either. Not this soon. They had left each other on bad terms a month before, and nothing had changed between them. Only now she was in love with another man.
“I don’t know, I guess four weeks is a long time. And things weren’t great with us when I left. You didn’t even say goodbye to me.” But they had spoken on the phone since, though only about the boys.
“I was pissed. I didn’t think you should go. You knew that and you went anyway.” And as he said it, it suddenly hit her that she wasn’t willing to give up a month in Paris for him, for her work, but she was willing to move her whole career to Paris for Gabriel. What was so different about them? Why was she willing to give up so much more for Gabriel than for her husband? But Gabriel made her feel loved. Andy made her feel guilty all the time, and now she really was.
“I thought the trip was important for my work,” she said honestly. “It was an honor and an opportunity.”
“And what I do is insignificant, is that it?” he asked, looking disappointed again, with the familiar angry edge to his voice.
“If you got a chance like that, I wouldn’t stop you. And I know it was a long time.”
“Did you have fun?” he asked. He looked like a kid who hadn’t been invited to the party, and it made her feel sorry for him.
“Some of the time, yes, I did. Some of it was very hard, like the school shooting. It was heartbreaking, but I learned a lot.”
“I was worried about you.”
“I was never in any danger. It was just sad, so many people were killed, mostly children.” He nodded.
“So what happens now? You go back to work? Business as usual?”
“I start on Monday at the hospital. The French crew arrives in two weeks, and I get leave for that. A lot of meetings and demonstrations, hospital tours, to show them our stuff here. It’s an exchange.”
“You’ll be busy.”
She nodded, and even more so with Gabriel. She could see that Andy felt left out, but there was no way to include him now, and she didn’t want him and Gabriel to meet. That was too racy for her, and too stressful.
She went to take a shower then, and got into bed early. Andy was already in bed when she got there, and he didn’t move closer to her when she got in. She turned off her light and slid down between the sheets. He read for a while, and turned off his own light. He didn’t reach out for her or try to touch her, and then she heard his voice in the dark. He sounded scared.
“Did you fall in love with someone else while you were there, Steph?” She didn’t answer for a beat, and then stiffened.
“No…it just feels weird between us now…like we’ve gotten disconnected somehow.” He didn’t answer for a long time. They’d been disconnected for months, or years.
“Let’s give it time to get used to each other again,” he said softly.
She nodded, grateful that he didn’t want to make love to her. She had been afraid he would, and she didn’t think she could do that. But maybe she’d have to. She didn’t know how she would explain it to him so he didn’t suspect anything, but for now she’d gotten a reprieve.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly, and that time she meant it. Sorry that he was angry, that she had gone away, that she had cheated on him and fallen in love with someone else. And then the voice she used to love answered her in the dark and tore at her heart.
“It’s okay.”
* * *
—
Somehow they managed to get through Sunday. They both focused on the boys so they didn’t have to focus on each other. On Monday, she went to work. She had gotten a dozen texts from Gabriel by then, telling her how much he loved her, how empty Paris was without her. He said everything she would have wanted him to say. He tried calling her on Sunday, and she didn’t pick up. She was in the car with Andy and the boys, going to the park to take a walk and throw a ball around.
She called him from her car on her way to work on Monday morning, and he was just as passionate. It all came at her in a rush, and tears rolled down her face as she told him she loved him, but he couldn’t tell that she was crying and she didn’t want him to know. She was so confused, she didn’t even know why she was crying.
When she got to UCSF in Mission Bay, it was a relief to get back to work. It was the one thing she knew how to do, no matter what else was happening. She could always work.
* * *
—
When Bill got back to his apartment on Sunday afternoon, it looked bleak and sterile. The lack of decor or paintings on the walls, the furniture he didn’t care about when he bought it, suddenly seemed even more depressing. And he missed Pip and Alex so much, it physically hurt. He changed into shorts and running shoes, and went out for a run along the Embarcadero. But nothing helped. The apartment was just as empty when he got back. And he couldn’t even call them. It was two in the morning in London.
He bought a salad at a deli on the way back from his run, and ate it in front of the TV. He thought about calling Wendy, just to hear a friendly voice, but called Tom instead. He sounded distracted and out of breath when he answered.
“Welcome back. I’m up shit creek. It’s going to take me a year to get this place cleaned up. I should never have asked Valérie to stay here. I should just put the whole place in a Dumpster.” Bill laughed at his distress, and suspected it was true.
“She’s not going to care. She loves you.”
“Not enough to live with this, unless she goes blind in the next two weeks.”
“I should give you my place. It looks like a motel. I never bothered to decorate it or finish buying furniture. It’s like living in an empty shoebox. It even has an echo.”
“That’s a lot better than this. I keep finding women’s underwear under the bed.”
“Don’t tell me your sad stories.” Bill laughed and was glad he’d called him. He’d gotten to like him a lot while they were in Paris. “The only underwear I find under my bed is my own.”
“That’s your own fault,” Tom reminded him.
“True,” Bill agreed with him. “When do you go back to work?”
“Not till Tuesday. I’m cleaning house all day tomorrow. I feel like someone’s French maid.”
“I’m on tomorrow. Do you want to have dinner this week?”
“I’d love to. You don’t have a spare vacuum cleaner, do you? I think I gave mine away, or someone took it. Or maybe I never had one.”
“It sounds like you need one of those services that cleans up crime scenes.”
“That’s not a bad idea. How’s Wednesday? I’m working Tuesday night.”
“Perfect.” They agreed on a place near Bill’s apartment that did good steaks and burgers, and had a busy bar.
Bill felt better after he called him. Going to Paris had been the right decision. He still missed Pip and Alex, but he had come home with seven new friends, three of them right in his own backyard.
* * *
—
When Wendy walked into her house in Palo Alto, it was spotless. Her cleaning woman came twice a week, and she could tell the pool cleaners had been there that day. Everything was in order, and there was enough food in the fridge to make breakfast, which was all she needed. The cleaner had left groceries for her.
She made herself unpack her bags before she texted Jeff, ignoring the rules he set for her about only texting him during office hours. She’d been gone a month, and she hadn’t heard from him since his trip to Aspen. She wanted to see how he’d respond to her text. “Just got home. Paris was great. Nice to be back. Love, W.” He didn’t respond for several hours, and then sent “Welcome home. See you Wednesday. J.” Not “I missed you. Can’t wait to see you. Love, J.” He didn’t ask if Wednesday was convenient. He expected to find her at the same time, same place. She wished she had the courage to tell him she was busy, but she didn’t. She had become a standard appointment, like a golf lesson or a massage. She wasn’t a person to him anymore, she was a convenience. There was something so degrading about it, but only because she let it happen. She had a responsibility in this too. He couldn’t use her if she didn’t let him. She had allowed it to happen for six years. It actually wasn’t like that in the beginning, but it had been for a long time. Once he stopped planning to leave his wife, she had become a weekly one-night stand on his terms.
He didn’t stop by on Monday or Tuesday when she finished work, as he sometimes did. He didn’t call her to see how she was, or say he was excited to see her.
* * *
—
He arrived at seven-thirty on Wednesday night, with a bottle of wine, as he always did, knowing that she would provide dinner. He didn’t take her out anymore, in case someone saw them. Though he didn’t admit it, she was his dirty secret. She didn’t cost him a penny except for her birthday and Christmas. She saw it all so clearly now after being away for a month. She wasn’t even his passion. They made love on Wednesday nights after dinner, but everything about their time together was orderly, scheduled, predictable, and as organized as he was. She suddenly realized what it would be like to be married to him. He controlled everything around him, and had the precision of a surgeon in all things. There was nothing spontaneous about him. She wondered how much fun Jane had with him, or if she was as cold and unemotional as he was. Maybe they made love on scheduled nights too.
He looked as handsome as ever when he parked his Mercedes in her driveway, and let himself into the house. He was wearing a suit, and she was wea
ring jeans and a lavender sweater she had bought in Paris. She usually dressed up for him, but this time she didn’t. She had set the table and cooked dinner, and he smiled when he saw her. He didn’t rush over to kiss her or tell her how much he’d missed her. Probably because he hadn’t. She wondered if he ever did, and surely not the way she missed him for the six days a week she didn’t see him over the last six years.
“You look great, Wendy,” he said. “You cut your hair.”
“Just a little.” She smiled back, and felt all the same familiar pulls and tugs that broke her heart, or maybe this time it was her heart trying to set itself free from bondage.
He opened the wine he had brought, handed her a glass, and she took a sip. They talked about his work until dinner. He didn’t ask her about Paris. By nine-thirty they were finished, and he went upstairs to shower and go to bed. He hadn’t touched her yet or kissed her, and she realized that he never did. It hadn’t shocked her before, but it did now. He hadn’t seen her for a month, but she got the impression he hadn’t missed her at all. He knew she’d be back. They talked about him during dinner, just as they always did.
He was already in bed, waiting for her, when she came out of her bathroom in a satin nightgown, dropped it on the floor, and slid into bed with him, and for an instant she hated herself for being so willing to sleep with him, no matter how little effort he made. But she saw it all so clearly now. She’d had a month to think about it, away from him.
He made love to her as he always did. He was an artful lover, but he never made her feel like he loved her, no matter how much she loved him. And afterward, he washed up and came back to bed, and ten minutes later he was asleep, without touching her again. She lay in bed looking at him, thinking that this was the last time she would lie next to him. She had given herself this one night so she could remember forever what it had been like and how little he gave her. And she wanted to be sure of what she was doing. Now she was.
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