Their mother seemed unable to argue with this last statement. She put her hand on his and squeezed it affectionately. Marci felt like an intruder on a private moment.
Wow. Marci wondered what Dottie was like, and what had become of her after Mildred ended things. Did she go on to her own loveless union, or escape to another relationship in a more liberal climate than the Old South? Or perhaps her broken heart was too much to bear, and she became a spinster librarian with eleven cats and a collection of porcelain dolls. How awful, Marci thought. No wonder Aunt Mildred resents all the choices I have available.
Half an hour later, as she dragged her wobbly college suitcase through the terminal, checking her phone every two minutes hoping to see a call from Doug, she couldn’t help but wonder what she was really doing with all the choices she had.
#
By the time he called it was nearly midnight. She had unpacked fretfully, with the windows open to let in the calming night air and the sound of Plastic Utensils rehearsing, which made her feel less lonely. She had stalled for a while, cleaning, knowing that she would be unable to sleep until she heard from him. By the time the phone vibrated on her nightstand, she had been lying in bed staring up at the ceiling for about twenty minutes.
“Hey,” he whispered.
“Hey,” she echoed.
“Sorry it took me so long to call back—it was kind of a long afternoon.” She held her breath, but he didn’t offer details. “How was your trip?”
“It was fine. Doug, I am so sorry I called your phone today; what happened? I’ve been so worried. Are you okay?”
He chuckled mildly. “Yeah, using your sister’s name was pretty good thinking, I guess.”
“She told you?”
“I was right next to her. We ended up driving back together because her brother needed her car...it’s a long story. I accidentally dropped my phone in the center console without thinking and she answered it. Anyway, I haven’t been able to shake her all afternoon, which is why I’m just now calling you back. I knew it was you, of course. None of my other mistresses are ballsy enough to call my phone in the middle of the day.”
She said nothing. She knew he was joking, but she couldn’t make herself laugh.
“Oh, come on. I’m kidding. You should be glad I’m handling it so well, shouldn’t you?”
“Do you think she suspects something?”
“She might suspect that there’s someone named Nicole with a number similar to mine, if that’s what you mean.”
“How did she seem? I mean, after the call?”
“I don’t know. Normal, I guess.”
“But she wouldn’t let you out of her sight? Don’t you think that means something? Where is she now? Where are you now?”
“Marci, calm down. How about ‘Hi, Doug, I love you and I missed you so much while I was partying all night in Atlanta.’ I tried to call you a couple of times, as you may have noticed.”
“I’m sorry,” she muttered. And waited.
“All right, all right, you need to know? My wife did not seem in any way unnerved, confused, or angry about the wrong number call to my cell phone. She seemed very much as if she had just received a call for the wrong number. She said nothing else about it, though I think in the future it might be good if we avoid that happening again, okay?
“We were together all afternoon because her brother is borrowing her car in Beaumont for a couple of days and she had set up dinner for us when we got back tonight with some friends of ours and forgotten to tell me about it. After dinner, the four of us came back to our house and played cards until late, which is why I couldn’t get away to call you. They are really good friends and it would’ve seemed weird for me to back out of the card game. She is now sound asleep upstairs, and I am outside in my car on the phone with you at midnight, and pretending to look for some work papers I need to go over by the morning. So, Nancy Drew, does it sound like I have filled in all the holes to your satisfaction?”
She was embarrassed to admit it, but it actually did help to hear all the details. Cathy had apparently not figured everything out from the phone call. Marci felt silly for how worried she had been.
They only talked for a few minutes and she gave him the basics of her trip, leaving out the details about Jake and the kiss at the bar, of course. These were two different worlds. Doug needed to go back inside, and when they hung up the phone she realized she was completely exhausted and fell straight to sleep.
Chapter 6
Cathy decided to stay in Austin for the next few weeks, because her brother was available to help in Beaumont. Work was crazy for Doug, too, so his availability to be with or even talk to Marci diminished substantially. They exchanged brief, thinly coded e-mails at work and talked on the phone very late at night while he sat outside in his car. Once he even fell asleep in the driver’s seat, telling Marci later that he had awakened to the sound of the garbage truck and had to pretend he’d just gone out to get the morning paper. His overall mood was rather dark, and the stress seemed to be wearing on his body, and his patience with Marci.
In terms of the amount of time they spent together, it wasn’t all that different from the early days of their relationship—stolen moments here and there. But while those brief encounters had made her happy early on, they were now a sharp contrast to the semi-domestic bliss they had been enjoying before Marci’s trip to Atlanta. Loneliness pressed in on her when she prepared meals for herself in the tiny kitchen. Memories of cooking with Doug created emptiness, where before him there had been only simple solitude.
The second Tuesday after her return, Doug managed to come by her place for about an hour after work. She spent all of Monday evening cleaning her apartment and ran out to buy his favorite beer. But her preparations mattered little. As soon as he walked in the door, he ravished her like a hungry animal. He kissed her forcefully, not with the gentle affection she had come to enjoy most of the time, but as though he had been in the desert for weeks and she was a first jug of water.
The sex was furious. As soon as she had fumbled the door locked—somewhat challenging with Doug’s tongue taking over her whole mouth—he reached under her lightweight skirt and tore down the tiny, cute panties she’d obsessed over picking out the night before. He pushed her, a little roughly, toward the wall and boosted her against it almost effortlessly. She wrapped her legs around him instinctively to hold herself up, and it took him just seconds to lift her skirt around her waist and to push himself into her. She wondered insanely how long he could hold her up this way, feeling distracted and self-conscious about her weight, but it was over quickly after all the time they’d spent apart. “I missed you,” he said with a small grin as he lowered her to the floor, sweating.
She went to the kitchen and opened two of the beers. He sat at her tiny kitchen table and pulled her onto his lap when she tried to walk past. “I really, really missed you,” he said hungrily into the back of her neck as she took a swig from her bottle. “You smell amazing. God, I love you so much.” She still felt a thrill to hear him say it.
Marci tried to think what she wanted to talk about with their limited time—their conversations had been so cropped lately, and his patience so short, that it seemed important to get today right while they were together. “I’ve written something new,” she offered. It was one way that her evenings alone were actually paying off.
“Mmm...really? What is it?” he said into to the back of her head, running his hands over her shoulders in a half-massaging, half-smoothing motion. The feeling was so intense that she was having trouble remembering exactly what it was that she had written.
“Well, it’s kind of an essay, I guess...” She started, unsure how to describe what she’d written. A satirical look at the life of a temp, it pieced together funny and demeaning stories from her assignments over the years. She had no idea if it was publishable, and if it was, who would want read it. She had half-hoped Doug would be impressed by it and give her some direction about what to do
next, but she was also pretty nervous to put it in front of his critical eye. “It’s based on some of my work experiences from the last few years.”
“Mmm-hmm. Great.” But he wasn’t listening to her words. He stood, keeping an arm around her shoulders, and moved both beers to the counter. Gently but insistently, he pressed her upper body to the table and pushed her legs apart. He started slowly, using his hand to massage her as he moved into her again. But soon he grabbed both her hips and pounded with an intensity that was both thrilling and a little bit painful. He made none of his usual effort to keep quiet because of her thin walls, but moaned loudly and even bellowed her name a couple of times. This recklessness was so unlike him, and yet it was everything she’d wished for during all the times when he was so careful and quiet. No one had ever called out her name that way.
By the time they had finished the second time, he had only ten minutes left before he had to go, which he used to take a shower. As she sat on the couch waiting for him, she thought she heard the theme to The A-Team drifting out of the bathroom.
When he plopped down next to her, he looked invigorated, ready to take on the world. “Thanks, babe, it was wonderful,” he said, brushing her cheek. She smiled thinly back. “I’ve got to get back for that meeting. I’m sorry we didn’t have much time to talk. I’d like to read that essay, though. Soon. Okay?”
She nodded and he kissed her sweetly. She couldn’t explain why, but once the door had closed behind him, she stayed in the same spot on the couch for a long time, staring at his half-full beer bottle.
#
The following Saturday when she got in from walking around the trail at Town Lake, there was a message from Jake on her machine. “Hey, Marce. I was just thinking, I don’t have plans for Memorial Day weekend and I haven’t been out to see you in a while. Maybe it’s time for another tequila tour of Austin? Give me a call, okay?”
A flood of memories came back from two years earlier, when Jake, Suzanne, and their college friend Rebecca had made the trip out to Austin for the South by Southwest festival. Marci had managed to take half a week off from the temp assignment she’d been working at the time—archiving files at a giant law firm—and the four of them had spent four days and nights boozing and listening to music in just about every bar, warehouse, and alleyway in the city. She smiled at the recollection. That trip was one of those times in her life she knew could never be re-created, and would never be forgotten.
Of course, what Jake was suggesting now was something different. Not a road trip and casual reunion of friends, but just the two of them and a long weekend alone together. She thought of the kiss they’d shared at the bar a couple of weeks ago and her heart began to beat faster. Could he really have feelings for her after all these years?
She felt guilty that she’d never told Doug about the kiss, and guilty that she’d never told Jake about Doug at all. He was one of her best friends, and keeping the secret from him was even more painful than keeping it from Suzanne. At least Suzanne’s heart was not at risk. Jake’s heart...she couldn’t think about it. She saved the message for later and headed for the shower.
#
Another exhausting week followed. Work had become crazy for everyone at the company, and the recent stress Doug had been exhibiting seemed to have infected the entire office. Even Victoria snapped at Marci for asking too many questions about an assignment, which was out of character for the always-together accounting manager. Meanwhile, Marci’s normally empty desk became crowded with an overflowing inbox and a slew of instructional post-it notes from the seven people for whom she was working on minor projects.
Work was a little nuts, but Marci was actually grateful to be busy and distracted. Doug had little time during the day to e-mail her, and their late-night conversations were somewhat perfunctory. He seemed to realize his inattentiveness, however, and did actually manage to sneak out one day and send flowers to her apartment, with a note that read simply “I love you always. – D.” She wanted desperately to bring them into the office, but decided that even without the card it was too dangerous.
The good news was that Cathy would be going out with girlfriends on Friday night, so Doug could at least make it over for dinner. Marci planned to learn from her mistake the previous week and keep her expectations as low as possible. She did not clean the apartment, nor did she buy special beer or plan an extravagant meal. If it worked out, if he showed up in time for dinner, they would order pizza and he could buy whatever he wanted to drink on his way over.
She tried to keep her evenings full in the meantime, talking with her mom, Nicole, Suzanne, and Beth for at least an hour each at some point during the week, and finally mustering the courage to call Jake and explain that Memorial Day weekend just wasn’t a great time for her. She didn’t offer any further explanation, because all the ones she’d thought of sounded lame when she rehearsed them, and he didn’t ask.
In fact, Jake seemed neither hurt nor terribly disappointed by the rejection of his plan, and Marci decided she had created the whole idea of his feelings for her out of thin air. They were friends. They lived six states apart. Sure, once in college they had messed around, and maybe kissed a few times since; but that was just what it was, and nothing more. There had to be hundreds of little promises like theirs written on cocktail napkins across the country, and people pulled them out to laugh at their immaturity and drunkenness. They didn’t follow through on them.
#
When Friday afternoon rolled around, she put all her papers into neat piles, shut down her computer, faxed her timesheet to the temp agency at 4:55, and headed quickly out the door. Despite her attempts to control her excitement, she bounded up the apartment stairs like a kid finally home for the summer. In her pocket she still had a folded post-it Doug had left on her desk while she was in the restroom: “6:30.”
She helped herself to a glass of white wine from the fridge and turned on the TV to help the hour pass more quickly while she waited for him. The knock on the door came at 6:29, and she forced herself not to bounce to the door to greet him, but walk like an actual grown-up person who had received visitors before.
Their reunion was passionate, but without the roughness and rush of last time. They shared a glass of wine on the couch and argued playfully about what kind of pizza to order. Doug rubbed her thigh under her skirt affectionately but did not push beyond that. She wondered whether he realized that she needed him to be more sensitive to her, or if he simply was not feeling such an intense need this time around.
Or maybe it was just that he knew he had most of the evening. With uncharacteristic disclosure, Doug explained that Cathy and seven of her girlfriends had gone all the way up to Round Rock to try a new restaurant and were going to a movie afterward. He had until at least eleven.
After the pizza, they made love quietly—conventionally, Marci realized—in her bed, in the dark, under the covers. She had almost fallen asleep when he began to talk about taking a trip with her, and it took her brain a moment to realize that he really was saying it. “...she goes on a girls’ trip to South Padre Island every June, for at least four or five days, and I was thinking maybe you and I could go somewhere during that same time. Somewhere quiet, like maybe in the West...”
“You mean go on a trip together?” Marci said, astonished. “Wouldn’t that be dangerous? How would we pay for everything without it showing up on your credit card bill? What if—”
“I have a plan,” he said conclusively. “I just need to know if you want to go.”
Could it be real? Full days and nights together? No work, no e-mail, no rushing out at dawn? “Of course I want to, Doug, but—”
“Good. Then it’s settled.” He wrapped his arms more tightly around her. After a moment, he added very softly, “I’m thinking of leaving her.”
“What?” Her heart pounded so hard she could almost see the sheet over her bare breast moving with it.
“I’m thinking of leaving her.”
“So this
trip is...running away?”
“No, of course not. I guess it would be, kind of a dry run. Just to make sure you can really stand being around me 24-7.”
Her head was spinning. This was everything she wanted, and yet— “So this is like an audition?”
“No, Marci, no. Come on, that’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean, then?” She got out of bed, grabbed her robe off the bathroom door, and flipped on the light. Doug was sitting up against her pillows, looking at her incredulously.
“I thought you’d be happy—I was just saying I thought it would be nice to have a trip together.”
“So if you’re leaving your wife, why don’t you just leave her, and then we’ll plan a trip? Why do we still have to sneak away while she’s on South Padre?” Marci’s anger was incomprehensible, even to her own ears. She should be happy he wanted to plan a trip; she should be happy he wanted to be with her. Why did it matter that the two things could be happening in tandem? Yet she couldn’t hold back. She glared at him, her eyes demanding a response.
He surrendered entirely, for the first time since she’d known him. “You’re right,” he said, looking down at his hands folded in his lap. “I haven’t thought it all through yet, and I shouldn’t have said anything until I had.
“It’s just…these last few weeks have been hell, Marci. My marriage is getting more miserable by the day, and not being able to see you, to touch you, it’s been...” He trailed off.
“I know,” she said.
When he looked up, she saw that his eyes were glistening. “Marci, I am so sorry. I need to think more about all of this, and then we should talk about it and decide everything together. It just felt so good to be lying here with you again; I guess I got carried away. Please sit down, and let’s just pretend this didn’t happen, okay?”
Now it was her turn to cry. She sank to the foot of the bed, and he leaned forward to brush her hair out of her face. So many emotions churned inside her; she couldn’t seem to label any of them. “Okay,” she managed, “okay.”
The Marriage Pact Page 7