by Rona Jaffe
After a while she heard Roger come into the office and begin to attend to his own patients. Her nerve fibers responded as they always had to the sound of his familiar voice, filling her with warm reassurance, and then her mind took over and she was cold with rage. Be dignified, she told herself. Walk tall, be calm. She decided she would pretend to know even more than she did without being specific enough for him to know when she was faking.
At the end of their day she passed him in the hall. “I’m going up to the apartment now,” she said. He looked frightened.
“I’ll be right up myself,” he said.
Upstairs in the welcoming rooms she had once believed were a refuge, Olivia repaired her makeup and poured herself a glass of wine. One sip, and then she put it down. She wanted full control of her faculties.
The door opened and Roger came in. He didn’t say anything, he just looked at her.
“So you’re having an affair with Wendy Wilton,” Olivia said.
“I . . .”
“I know about the gym clothes, the phone calls, the meetings, the lies, the fact that her doorman knows you. Don’t lie any more now because then I’ll hate you.”
“You’ll hate me anyway,” Roger said.
“At least you didn’t say: ‘It’s not what you think.’ ”
“It’s not.”
“I’m sure it’s worse.”
He closed his eyes. She thought he looked very pale.
“Why did you need someone else?” she asked.
There was a long pause. “Why are you asking me a question that is so hard to answer?” he said finally, softly, sounding beaten.
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Hard for you to answer or for me to hear?”
“Oh, Olivia . . .”
“I want to know,” Olivia said.
“I don’t love her,” Roger said. “Not at all. She knows that.”
“She must feel very used.”
He sighed. “For what it’s worth, I’ve never done this to you before,” he said. “Never in all these years.”
“Really.”
“I promise.”
“Then what makes her so special?”
“I don’t want to talk about her,” Roger said.
“Then let’s talk about us. Why now?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know . . . She . . . I don’t know.”
“Obviously she had something you needed that you couldn’t get with me.”
“I love you,” Roger said. “It’s you I love, I want to spend my life with you. I can’t imagine life without you.”
“You wanted both of us.”
He sighed again.
“Is she better in bed than I am? No, forget I asked that. I don’t want to hear it.”
“An affair is exciting and dangerous,” Roger said. “That’s the only thing she and I had that you and I didn’t have. It has nothing to do with you. You’re my heart. She’s like a stranger.”
“And you had sex with her twice a week and could hardly ever bring yourself to make love to me. What does that mean?”
“I’m too old to satisfy two women,” Roger said.
“Oh, sure, when it suits your purpose to say it.”
“I am.”
“Then why couldn’t you have tried to work it out with me? If you don’t find me exciting anymore, is that the end of it? Ten years is all it can last?”
Roger poured himself a glass of wine. His hand was shaking ever so slightly. “Olivia, I’m not going to leave you.”
“You already did.”
“Don’t say that. It isn’t true.”
“Everything’s different now,” Olivia said. She couldn’t believe how calm she was. It was as if she were watching herself from one step away. “I might have to leave you.”
“Don’t.”
“Then you can be with her all the time.”
“That’s the last thing I want. If I had wanted that I would have done it.”
“Will you stop seeing her?”
A pause. “Yes.”
“Because I want you to?”
“Because that’s the way it is.”
“Not because I want you to, or you wouldn’t have started with her in the first place. And not because you want to. It’s because I found out and you’re afraid I might go. Life stinks.”
“But I do want to, Olivia. I wanted to for quite a while, but I didn’t know how.”
“And now you’ll find a way.”
He didn’t answer. She supposed his silence meant she had been right. He would have kept both of them as long as he could, drifting along, selfish, weak, needing Olivia to force the break.
The image floated into her mind of her second husband, Stuart, who had cheated with all those women. What was wrong with her that she had such bad luck? Was it her fault? Did she pick men like that? Did she drive them away? Or was that what you had to expect? No, Stuart had flaunted it. He was not Roger. But this Roger wasn’t Roger either.
“I want you to sleep in the den until this is all settled,” Olivia said. “I can’t have you coming home from her to me.”
“All right,” he said quietly.
“And I’m going to have an AIDS test. There are no free rides anymore. I think you should have one, too.”
“She did,” he said, sounding embarrassed. “She’s fine.”
“Where did you meet her, anyway?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“I want to know.”
“At the gym.”
Of course, why not? All those cute little things with their makeup on, and their jewelry, and their perky ponytails, and their designer workout clothes with the thong in back showing off their tight little buns. . . . “What does she do for a living?”
“She’s a stockbroker.”
Smart, too. And wanted Roger, who was taken. And had gotten him. Olivia didn’t know what to believe in anymore.
“I thought if you and I didn’t get married it would stay romantic,” she said sadly. “I thought this time it would work. We were so happy.”
“We are happy,” Roger said, his eyes pleading. She almost melted at that look on his face, but she looked away until she had herself under control again.
“We might as well have been married,” she said. “We have all this community property. The house, our practice. It would be like a divorce. Dividing everything up. The lawyers. Selling the house, dividing the patients. Would we keep the clinic and work together as friends—such a modern divorce—or would we have to lose it along with all our other dreams? At least we wouldn’t have to fight over the kids.”
“Wozzle and Buster,” Roger said fondly, trying to win her. “They’re our kids.”
He had his way of pulling her apart and she hardened her heart against it. “I want you to end it with Wendy Wilton now,” Olivia said. “From here on in, every day it gets worse.”
“She’s very neurotic,” Roger said. “She’s emotional, unpredictable. I have to handle the breakup carefully. I don’t want her coming to see you.”
“The way she already did?”
He paled again. Of course she had meant Wendy’s office visit, but Roger didn’t know that was all there was. “Did she tell you she tried to kill herself?” he asked.
“No. Did she?”
“She pretended to. It was a cry for help. I don’t want to drive her to do it again more seriously.”
So Wendy wanted Roger so much she was willing to do anything, risk anything to keep him. While Olivia was trying to act controlled and strong.
“Do what you have to do in the way you think best,” she said. “I’ll get out the linens for the den. You can use the bathroom in there. The shower’s good.”
He was silent as she laid the f
olded guest linens on the sofa bed in the den. Then he went into their bathroom and took out all his things. She felt her heart scream.
16
WHEN YOU HAVE LOST your lover there is no season so sad as late spring, when the lengthening days with their pastel twilights and softening air remind you of romantic beginnings and hopeful continuances that are not for you. Now that Olivia and Roger were sleeping in separate rooms under an uneasy truce, she felt she had the worst of both worlds. Sometimes it felt as if they were living miles apart, and yet they were in the same house with its closeness that made it hard to have secrets. But as he had once said jokingly to her cousin Nick, she had such separation anxiety that she couldn’t even leave a bad hotel, so how could she push him further out of their life together?
She knew he had not yet made a clean break with Wendy.
“I can’t just drop her,” he said. “She’s too fragile.”
“Most men do it,” Olivia said.
“I’m not most men, and she’s not most women.”
“Neither am I,” Olivia said.
She waited for him to tell her he had finally ended the affair forever, but he didn’t, and sometimes he went out saying something ambiguous, knowing avoidance was not so heinous as a lie or as insulting as the truth. He went to the gym only two or three times a week, so she supposed he really went. Once in a while she did a check on his gym clothes and they were always used.
“She asked me to try to be friends with her,” he said. “There’s something sad about that.”
“Friends!”
“I feel as though I’ve messed up her life.”
“What about mine?”
“But you have me.”
Olivia didn’t answer, because anything she could have said would have cut.
Every evening she and Roger still had dinner together. He always asked her first if she was free, as if she too had another life. She thought perhaps she should start to have one. When they had dinner together they tried to pretend nothing had changed, which was impossible, so they gently talked about safe things: the news, patients, movies. He even asked her if she had heard from her cousins and what they were up to, a subject that had never interested him before.
“Charlie the Perfect is going to run the New York Marathon with his son again next fall,” Olivia told him. “Remember it was in the newspaper last year when they did it together and they both finished at the same time? He’s fifty and Tony is twenty-five. Charlie trains six days a week. And he’s a vegetarian. But I couldn’t decide if he finished the same time as his son because he’s such a good athlete or because they’re so symbiotic.”
Roger laughed. “You talked to him?” he asked, surprised. Charlie the Perfect ran the store with his father, Uncle Seymour, but other than that his life never touched most of the rest of the cousins.
“Of course not. Aunt Myra told me. And she said Charlie got cows for the summer again.”
“Cows?”
“They have this estate in Beaverkill. A hundred acres. Cows look very picturesque grazing and lying around, and you don’t have to pay to cut the grass, but they’re hard to take care of during the winter, so every spring Charlie and his wife buy a herd of cows to decorate the estate, and then in the fall they sell them.”
“Not to a slaughterhouse!”
“Of course not. To a dairy.”
“Do they make a profit?”
“I don’t know,” Olivia said. “For a used car you don’t. Used car, used cow? Don’t ask me.”
Roger laughed again.
Look how funny you think I am, Olivia thought. How well we get along. Has Wendy got anything for you besides sex? I doubt it. Maybe fear. How much obligation do you have, and for how long, to a suicidal mistress? Get rid of her. But maybe you think I’m boring. Maybe you’re only laughing because you’re fond of me.
She thought perhaps sex with her was boring compared to sex with Wendy. Maybe it had been boring all along, and that was why he had looked elsewhere. Maybe she had been too complacent. If he came back she would try again, make it more exciting. But then she realized that she was too angry with him to try at all. They didn’t touch each other anymore; they were both too afraid of her rage.
At night she let Wozzle sleep on her bed. Buster slept in the den with Roger, confused the first night and then quickly getting used to it. Watching the large blond dog walk calmly into the den behind Roger, seeing Roger shut the door behind them, Olivia felt as if they were truly separated and torn apart, and that Roger had taken with him all his worldly goods.
“Oh, Wozzle,” she murmured, dropping tears into her dog’s soft black fur. “Wuzzy, Wuzzy, what’s going to become of us?”
She had a hard time getting to sleep. She watched old movies on television late at night so she could have another excuse to cry. Sometimes, when there were patients staying over in the clinic, she wandered downstairs to look at them. Everything was so clean. The sleeping animals breathed quietly in their cages. Everything she and Roger had—this practice, their house, their life together—had been the fulfillment of their dreams. Maybe it was true that when you got what you wanted, the trouble began.
Her old friend Alys called. “I haven’t seen you since Thanksgiving,” Alys said. “This is a disgrace.”
“I know,” Olivia said. “Everyone gets so busy.”
“Can you have lunch with me next week? No, dinner. Let’s have dinner. Will Roger let you out?”
“As in out of jail?” Olivia said dryly. She knew Roger would rush to dinner with Wendy if he knew she had made plans of her own. “Lunch would be easier,” she said. “Things are a little hectic right now.”
They met at Alys’s new favorite Italian restaurant. It looked just like Alys’s last favorite Italian restaurant, and as always Alys ordered a salad with no dressing—a spare handful of torn-up greens on a plate for six dollars—and dry grilled chicken, and as always the salad annoyed Olivia, and by extension so did Alys. Olivia ordered just the chicken. The waiter looked disappointed. Alys had had her hair cut very short since Olivia had last seen her and she looked younger and quite attractive.
“You look great,” Olivia said.
“I have found the new best hairdresser in New York,” Alys said. “You have to go.” Every six months Alys found the new best hairdresser. Her life was a constant search for better beauty.
“How’s your job going?” Olivia asked, passing it off. Alys was an editor on a women’s magazine, and sometimes wrote an article when no one else wanted to do it, for which she claimed she was unfairly meagerly paid.
“I hate it just as much as always,” Alys said, “but they’re cutting down the staff and firing people right and left because of the recession, so I don’t dare leave.” She sipped from her glass of their seven-dollar bottle of Evian water. Olivia thought about the people who were hungry and out of work.
“You’re lucky to have this job,” she said. “You have great perks.”
“Yes, I get on screening lists. And I still have an expense account, so lunch is on me. You did Thanksgiving.”
“Thank you. So how’s life?”
“It’s seven months since I’ve been to bed with a man. I’m ashamed to tell anybody.”
“That’s not so long these days,” Olivia said.
“I take a certain grim satisfaction in thinking I’m working on my first celibate year. I hardly ever meet men anymore. They’re married or taken or gay or just hopeless. I’d settle for the hopeless ones, but there seems to be a waiting list.”
“You’ll find someone,” Olivia said.
“You always say that. You’re so lucky you have Roger.”
“You always say that.”
“It’s true.”
“Roger is having an affair,” Olivia said. As soon as the words came out she felt better. It had been hard keeping the burden all to h
erself.
“No! What a rat! How did you find out?”
“It’s a long story.” Olivia told her most of it.
“How old is she?” Alys asked.
“Late twenties, I’d guess. No more than thirty. And pretty. Roger’s almost fifty.”
“Do you remember when we were that age and going out with older, sophisticated married men? We thought their wives were some old bat. The old bat was probably in her mid-forties. What we are now.”
“Don’t even say it.”
“We couldn’t understand why those guys wouldn’t leave their wives for us. And sometimes they did leave them for somebody else—young, of course. It’s come full circle. When we were young they cheated with us, and now they cheat on us.”
“I never went out with a married man who wasn’t already separated,” Olivia said.
“Well, I did.”
“Fairly recently, as I remember.”
“What are you going to do about Roger?”
“I’m afraid to think about it,” Olivia said.
“He’ll give her up eventually and then you’ll reconcile and forgive him. People don’t throw a relationship away when they have as much together as you two do.”
“I don’t believe it can ever be the same again,” Olivia said.
“You know,” Alys said thoughtfully, “ever since I was a kid I wondered what real life was. I kept waiting for it to happen to me. I looked at other people, their families, what they did for fun, and I wondered if that was it. What did they do when I wasn’t there? When I was a grown-up, I mean actually now, I even used to look into the windows of the big apartment building across the street from me—everybody keeps their blinds up in New York like no one else exists—and I would watch people’s lives. Who’s watching television, who’s alone, who’s found someone, who’s out for the evening. I’d watch them cooking. I’d look into people’s shopping carts at the supermarket. I wondered how often people had sex. What their everyday conversations were.”