about this.
She still had an intense fear of being caught, of losing control over the surprise that she was not the good wife he hoped she would become, but she had to accept that she had come this far without getting discovered. Barring the occasional offhand comment from Lisa at the salon and the accusatory voicemail from Sarah, all evidence pointed to it being perfectly natural, even preferable, to have a domestic relationship with one man and a lustful, romantic tryst with another. One made the other tolerable.
In fact, she had become so comfortable with Charlie, everything became so familiar, that she could almost pretend she was in a relationship with him. When they had the rare opportunity to spend the night together, facilitated by some carefully constructed untruths (sleeping at Lisa’s, working late at the office), they would brush their teeth together side by side in the mirror much like any married couple would. She enjoyed the simple details that affairs often avoided; watching him shave while she was seated on the toilet lid, helping him find his socks in the morning, reminding him of an afternoon dentist appointment and giving him a housewifely goodbye kiss at the hotel room door.
They chose to ignore the fact that the goodbye kiss at the door was merely a function of wanting to avoid being seen leaving a hotel together.
When they only had a few hours in the afternoon, Charlie always got dressed immediately after they had sex, while Ronnie tried to remain undressed and in bed until the final moment. Sometimes Charlie would get anxious and pace around the room aimlessly, checking his watch and then the red glow of the bedside alarm. She forgave him for this.
This time while Charlie paced his eyes were accusing her, the irony of his disdain escaping him. Ronnie took a long drag off her cigarette, looking relaxed and unaffected. “Let me get this straight. You’re mad at me because I waited until after we fucked to tell you that I was going to marry him?”
“That’s not the point, Ronnie.”
“Answer the question.”
“Yes. I’m mad.”
“That’s insane, Charlie.”
“Why? I feel manipulated. Used. When did this happen?”
“Ha! You feel used?”
“Yes, I feel used.”
“Charlie, you’re using me a couple of times a week in a hotel room to get away from your wife. You’re using me for your midlife crisis. You’re using me to get laid.”
“Stop it,” Charlie said. “You know that’s not true. But hell, if that’s what you need to tell yourself to get by.”
Charlie opened the minibar and pulled out a small bottle of Canadian Club. Ronnie smoked the final drag off her Belmont. They were silent as he poured the entire contents of the tiny bottle into one of the glasses on the dresser and drank a dramatic gulp.
“You don’t want ice for that?” Ronnie asked.
“When did this happen?” Charlie asked, ignoring her.
“The proposal? A while ago. It happened a while ago.”
“What the hell is a while ago?”
“About a month?”
“What the fuck, Veronica? You waited a whole month to tell me?”
“Actually, it’s closer to two.”
Charlie buried his head in his hands.
“God, don’t be melodramatic. There’s no need for that.”
“Are you going to wear a white dress? Advertise your ‘purity’?”
“God. What does that even mean?”
“It means you’re a hypocrite. You had sex with me. Over and over and over and over and over,” Charlie’s volume had increased and he slammed down his glass hard on the heavy wood bedside table.
“You have some strange concepts of purity.”
“All I know is that you fucked me knowing full well that you’re planning on marrying him.”
“And you fucked me knowing you’re married. That seems worse to me. But it’s not really a competition for who can be more inhuman, is it?”
“I’m just saying, having an affair while you’re planning to marry someone is pretty sociopathic. Oh my god, are you planning a wedding? Are you planning a wedding in between seeing me? Are thinking about centrepieces when you’re with me?”
Charlie had begun to pace around the room aimlessly, his fists clenched.
“Charlie, now you’re being mean and slightly crazy. You need to calm down.”
“Calm down? You’re getting married.”
“I didn’t say I was planning on marrying him. I said that he’d asked me and that I said yes.”
“Tricky, tricky,” Charlie said, lifting his glass from the table and tipping it side to side mockingly.
Ronnie sat up, breasts exposed, her face a mixture of amusement, rage, and sadness. “Please. Couldn’t you be upset that I’m going to marry him, instead?”
“I am upset about that. Does this mean you’re leaving me?”
“Charlie, you’re married. Have you left me yet?”
“You know, the day you tell me you’re pregnant? That’s the day I give up the faint hope that you’ll ever leave him.”
“I doubt there’s much risk of that,” she said, her face suddenly soft with sadness.
To this comment he finally relented. “Oh, Ronnie. I’m sorry.”
He returned to the bed, whisky glass in hand, and ran his palm slowly and lightly across her shoulder, and when she sighed encouragingly, her left breast. He did so in a way that suggested he would miss her if she was gone. She smiled.
“Don’t marry him, Veronica. Please don’t marry him.”
“Should I marry you instead?”
“You know that’s not possible. You know it’s complicated. You know I can’t—”
“I deserve something. Something like what you have. A home. A life. A child. And besides, my marrying him will never change the way I feel about you.”
Charlie sulked for a moment and then realized the gravity of her sentiment. “Because marriage means nothing to people like us,” he said.
She knew that this was completely true.
“Is it awful that that makes me feel better about everything?” Ronnie asked sincerely.
Charlie put his glass on the bedside table, next to the makeshift ashtray, and leaned in to kiss her.
( CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN )
“Now, I totally understand cold feet and all that, but your lack of wedding excitement is starting to concern me. Most women would have gone intolerably loopy by now.” Lisa put down her bottle of beer and continued applying dye to Ronnie’s hair.
The shop was closed and the two had stayed late to have drinks and catch up. A few beers in, Lisa decided Ronnie should be a redhead and there was no convincing her otherwise. Ronnie had been too exhausted to object, a day of enduring the problems of her clients behind her and an evening of enduring her own ahead.
“I mean, aren’t you supposed to be going crazy about dresses and flowers and all that by now? Aren’t I supposed to be bored of you and all your wedding talk?”
“It’s not that I’m not excited,” Ronnie said, looking warily at her dye-soaked head in the mirror.
“It’s just that you don’t give a fuck.”
“Yeah, that. Should you really be doing this drunk?” Ronnie asked, eyeing Lisa’s exuberant application.
Lisa laughed. “You have no idea how many times I’ve done this drunk.”
“I don’t really want to know, thanks.”
Lisa put the dye brush down and lit a Belmont. When Ronnie shot her a vague disapproving look for smoking in the salon, Lisa shrugged it off. “Honey, if you knew the shit I got up to in this place after hours you’d be thankful it was just a cigarette.”
“I’m learning so much about you I never wanted to know,” Ronnie replied.
“So why did you even say yes in the first place?”
“To Aaron or becoming a redhead?”
“To marriage, obviously.”
“After a while you start to owe someone a commitment, no?”
“Uh, no. Fuck that. Life’s too short for counting up who owes who what.”
“Easy for you to say, you don’t owe anyone anything.”
“Yeah, but you owe me for this and how stunning you’re going to be when I’m through with you. Men are going to be falling all over you.”
“Like I need that in my life.”
“Hey, do you think this hair dye causes cancer? ’Cause if so we’re totally fucked, girl,” Lisa said, her cigarette dangling from
her lips.
( CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT )
“You changed your hair.”
Ronnie touched her head self-consciously.
“I like it,” Charlie said, pulling her in for a quick kiss without the fear that they would be spotted.
They had gone to a bookstore together that Thursday afternoon in May. Ronnie had driven them out to a big box store in Scarborough in the Volvo station wagon so they could be safe from being seen. They held hands as they walked through the door, and parted as soon as they were inside. The agreement that Ronnie had concocted was they would split up, find each other a gift—a book (not a yoga mat, or scented candle, or inspirational card)—and meet by the magazines when they were done.
Charlie hurried off to the children’s literature section and Ronnie to health and self-help.
With their purchases tucked snugly under their arms and their fingers still entwined, they went for a pint at a faux-Irish pub on a suburban six-lane street to exchange their finds.
“Did you notice they only had four of my books there? A fucking crime.”
“Charlie,” she said, touching his arm lightly. “I need to talk to you about something important.”
“I need to talk to you about something important! Four copies! Shameful.”
“Listen to me. I’ve been trying to get you alone so I can talk to you about something important,” she pleaded.
She realized how silly that statement was. They were always alone.
Charlie wasn’t listening anyway. He had moved on to finding a typo in the menu. Typos on menus made Charlie crazy. Typos anywhere generally made Charlie crazy, misplaced modifiers and incorrect commas, but those on menus were a particular sore spot. He was visibly enraged and threatening to see the management while Ronnie tried to regain his attention. He was removing a felt-tip pen from his inside jacket pocket with the full intention of circling the improperly used apostrophe.
“Charlie, did you hear me? This is important. I had some tests done.”
“What kind of tests? You know, it’s not even as if they got it wrong. They actually made something up. They made a word up and put it in their fucking menu.”
“A biopsy. I had a biopsy done.”
Charlie finally looked up from the menu. He put the pen down on the table slowly. He stared at her and said nothing.
“It’s really not a big deal. It’s just a test. They found something they didn’t like and they—”
Charlie’s eyes suddenly welled up with tears. He gripped the old, heavy wooden table with such force that it shook, and then broke his own rule about touching in public by grabbing Ronnie’s hand. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m telling you now.”
“There are so many things you never tell me.”
“Charlie—” she said, pulling her hand away. “I’m sorry, Charlie. But this isn’t really about you.”
“You don’t have cancer. You can’t have cancer.”
“I never said I had cancer. I just said—”
“Don’t worry, Ronnie, you don’t have cancer.”
“I’m not worrying. I just wanted to tell you. It’s early yet. We don’t know what we’re going to have to do.”
“What are we going to do? What are you and Aaron going to do?”
“No, what the doctors are going to do.”
“What does that even fucking mean?”
“Surgery. Then I’ll be better.”
“But—the baby. You wanted a baby.”
Ronnie had never heard Charlie refer to “the baby” before. “We still don’t know anything.”
Other patrons were staring now. Ronnie looked down at the various initials, hearts, arrows, and curse words engraved in the tabletop by suburban teens, bored and falling in love in Scarborough. She needed to avoid eye contact as Charlie stared at her with increasing intensity, so much that it unnerved her.
The waitress, ill timed, returned to the table with a second round of pints. She paused for a moment and stared at the menu and Charlie’s felt-tip pen.
“Um, sir,” she said when she put the pints down on the coasters. “You can’t deface our menu.” She put her French manicured finger directly on the apostrophe Charlie had circled.
“Fuck you,” Charlie said.
The books lay out on the table, snug in their shopping bags, unopened, next to their untouched pints.
Charlie had bought Ronnie Goodnight, Moon.
Ronnie had bought Charlie a book on loved ones dealing with cancer.
She apologized to the waitress while Charlie found himself incapable of moving.
“I would have been able to give you a baby,” he said.
( CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE )
The hotels, despite the expense, soon became ritual.
Charlie would invent imaginary literary events, occasionally pretending he was reading in a small town somewhere so he could spend the night. It amazed Ronnie that his wife never took the time to check, but he assured her that she cared little for the details of the literary world and wouldn’t know where to look anyway. The only reason Ronnie believed it was because she wouldn’t know where to look either.
As far as Aaron was concerned, Ronnie had seen her doctor, her dentist, her chiropractor, her eye doctor, her massage therapist, gotten a pedicure (which Charlie did to maintain the ruse, painting her toes while she was nude), and developed a new passion for going to the gym.
“That’s really great for the baby, Ronnie.”
What baby? she thought.
The hundreds of dollars they spent on rooms was difficult to conceal, but somehow they managed it. It was exciting touring the city via its king-sized beds and room-service menus. Ronnie would always order the club sandwich, and Charlie would always drain the minibar of its Canadian Club.
They would often meet at the hotel instead of beforehand, and he would check in while she attempted to look inconspicuous from a distance, drinking a cocktail in the lobby bar to soothe her nerves or pretending to read Toronto tourism brochures provided by the concierge.
Ronnie had spent much of her adult life wondering longingly about the “anatomy of an affair,” had seen it depicted in movies and on television in all its disastrous glory, but when she was actually in it it all seemed too easy. Calm. And certainly not glamorous. There was never anyone in the lobby to run into, no colleague, client, or old friend to spot them and question why they were there.
Still the nerves affected her. Once they had the key Ronnie would rush to the elevator, press the button rapidly, and fidget nervously until it arrived. If they rode it alone she would check for a camera as Charlie gripped her hips and kissed her. If they rode it with someone else Ronnie would stand as far away from Charlie as possible, even press the button for another floor to appear completely innocent. Once they got to the room she would close tight all the heavy curtains, claiming a perhaps faux concern that someone was spying through the windows in the opposite buildings. She would turn on all the lights and turn up the radio, make things seems simple and inconspicuous, simply two colleagues chatting in a well-lit business travel hotel room. She would smooth flat the heavy garish blankets with her damp palm while Charlie washed his face in the bathroom sink.
He would have his steak well done and she would order hers medium rare. They would talk about the university. They would talk about the clients she’d had that week. He would talk about his book. Eventually they made the rule that they would never talk about Tamara or Aaron, and if that rule was broken it would only lead to arguing.
They would certainly never talk about Noah, especially now that Noah was doing so much worse. Charlie would not mention the fact that he believed Noah was doing so much worse because he was never around.
They certainly did not mention cancer.
At first Charlie booked the Sheraton and the Westin, paid in cash, but as time wore on it was the Holiday Inn. Ronnie never questioned how he was paying the bill, always fearful that Tamara’s billable hours were facilitating their affair. As the hotels got worse the water got harder and the conversations more strained, the curtains more musty, the fucking more frantic. Where at first it had been deep conversations and lovemaking, sweet and sticky like teenagers in those first months of discovery, they soon clawed at each other’s bodies in a hungry desperation that suggested they were attempting to eradicate each other, that if they could only destroy each other the sinking weight of guilt would finally cease.
“Every moment I spend away from you is unbearable.”
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