“I’ve never been unfaithful to Ben.”
“I would hope so. You’ve only been married for a year.”
She hesitates. “We almost never have sex anymore.”
When I open my mouth, no words come out, only a little croak of surprise.
“We used to do it every day,” she says, blushing. “But now it’s like twice a week. Maybe three if I’m lucky.”
I almost laugh but I can see that she isn’t kidding. “That’s not so bad,” I say, falsely cheerful. “Before Tim and I got divorced, we probably did it once a month. Which I suppose is one reason he started having sex with someone else. If you took a poll, I bet you’d find that a lot of married people would say that twice a week is very good. Even exceptional.”
This is the first time in the six months we’ve known each other that she has spoken so openly about her sex life. Any complaints about Ben have always been more or less G-rated: his mother calls too often and he’s afraid to tell her to give it a rest for a while; he won’t let Rachel kill flies or spiders—they all have to be taken outside and released behind their apartment building. She also wishes that he made more money as a music teacher at an elementary school here in Iowa City, enough so that they could start thinking about having a baby, because she turned thirty-two this year, and she worries that her ovaries won’t cooperate for too much longer. I’ve told her that she has at least ten more years, maybe thirteen or fourteen, but she doesn’t want to use hormone treatments. “I’ve heard they make you fat and grouchy. No drugs. I want to get knocked up the old-fashioned way.”
“When’s the last time you had fun with a guy?” she asks.
“What kind of fun?” I ask, although I’m pretty sure I know what she means.
“You know.” She rolls her eyes suggestively.
“It’s been a while.”
In fact, it has been a couple of years, since Tim left me, back when I was fifteen pounds lighter and still in my thirties and using my degree in accounting to earn a living. When they closed the tax auditing service I worked for, I couldn’t get another accounting position no matter how hard I tried. Every job that I interviewed for had at least fifty applicants, some much more experienced than I was, which is how I ended up in my current circumstances: living on the top floor of my great-aunt Judy’s creaky old house and talking to kooks and lonely hearts and neurotics for $11.65 an hour, telling them that they shouldn’t gargle Sunshine dish liquid when they’re out of mouthwash because it will make them sick. “Yes, sick sick,” I told the kook who asked me this. “Like you might need your stomach pumped sick.” His reply: “Is this stuff actually safe for me to wash my dishes with? Because it sounds dangerous.” Not a bad question at all, but I could give him only one answer.
“Maybe Jack has a friend I can introduce you to,” says Rachel. “Maybe I should call and ask him to bring his friend along. Do you like older men?”
“I do, but please don’t ask him to bring anyone.” I look at her flushed face, her dark eyes still avoiding mine if I try to hold her gaze for more than a second or two. “Are you really thinking of running around on Ben? Wouldn’t it just be easier to tell him that you want to have sex more often?”
“I’m not going to sleep with Jack. I just want to flirt a little. That’s all.”
Rachel, you’re heading for divorce, I almost say. Don’t you see? If you want to stay with Ben, you shouldn’t be courting trouble like this.
What I do say is, “You’ve never been married to anyone but Ben?”
She gives me a funny look. “No, of course not. You knew that.”
A moment later, she says, “I’m not a tramp. You shouldn’t think that about me.”
“I don’t.”
She regards me. “But you don’t approve of me meeting Jack.”
“It’s none of my business. You should do whatever you’d like. But I do think you’re inviting trouble into your life. What if this Jack guy is dangerous?”
“He’s not. I Googled him. He has a website. He uses it mostly to write about his beagles, Georgia and Otis.” She laughs self-consciously. “He takes them to dog shows. Since he left the Board of Trade, he’s been traveling all over with them.”
“Lucky dogs, I guess,” I say. “What does his son teach?”
“Environmental science. I Googled him too. He’s there, like Jack said. His name is Mace Taggart.”
“That sounds like a fake name.”
“It does, but I guess it’s real. He got his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, which is where I wanted to go but I had to settle for Iowa because it was a lot cheaper than Boulder. Maybe I’ll get to meet him at some point. Maybe you’ll get to meet him and he’ll be the perfect man for you.”
“He’s probably married. Or else he’s gay.”
“No, he’s probably divorced.”
I look at her and we both laugh. “Probably,” I say.
A couple of things happen on Saturday, the day Rachel is meeting Jack. Cassie reports to Mr. Lambert that she has contracted mono and can’t work her Saturday-morning shift and probably none of her other hours for the next couple of weeks. Even though I’m supposed to take my aunt to play bingo at the Elks (her favorite thing in the world, along with George Clooney movies), I agree to cover the shift because Rachel won’t be able to do it, Britt is already scheduled, and Sam isn’t answering his phone, being smart enough, unlike me, to know better. Mr. Lambert, in the rare emergency, will cover a few hours, but he is probably off playing golf or visiting his mistress or buying silk socks in Chicago. I have to call and beg seven different friends, some mine, some my aunt’s, before one of them agrees to take her to bingo in my stead, and then when I show up at the call center, the coffee pot is filthy, crumbs are scattered all over our work area from either Sam or Cassie, who both regularly eat Twinkies and Cheetos from the vending machine like they are the purest health food, and Britt is also sick, but she tells me that she only has a cold and didn’t think that it warranted calling in sick. I try not to touch my eyes and nose, and also try to apply hand sanitizer every half hour without her noticing, but eventually she smiles at me and says, “I’m sure you won’t catch my cold. You’re hearty as a horse, Marcie. Didn’t you once tell me that you take that—what’s it called? Ekphrasia?”
“Echinacea. I do, yes, when I remember to.”
“You’ll be just fine,” she says, reaching across the table to pat my hand, which I just put hand sanitizer on. She laughs a little, seeing my face. “Sorry,” she murmurs, trying to suppress her smile. She is a pretty older woman, often in good spirits, and frets needlessly about her figure. She’s more fit than I am from frequent two-stepping with her longtime boyfriend, Wayne, a man she says she doesn’t plan to marry, mostly because they both have houses, ones they’ve paid off, and the fuss of selling and moving is just too exhausting to consider. There are also his three children, a boy and two girls who don’t like her and think she’s a gold digger, which she isn’t, but she says that someday she might marry Wayne just to spite his greedy kids.
The second thing that happens on Saturday is Rachel calls around five thirty, a few hours after I get home from work, and tells me that Jack stood her up and she ate too many garlic breadsticks and got drunk on white zinfandel at the Olive Garden. Ben had to come pick her up too, which wasn’t so easy to do because she had their car.
“What did Ben say about you being drunk at the Olive Garden by yourself on a Saturday afternoon?” I ask. “Did you even tell him you were going there?”
“I told him I was doing some shopping and that I might have lunch afterward. So, no, he wasn’t surprised when I called from there but he didn’t like that I was kind of drunk. I still feel a little tipsy.”
“Where are you?”
“At home. Ben’s out jogging. He wants to run a marathon in the spring.”
She wants to fool around on this gorgeous, athletic man? I really don’t understand her.
“Has Jack called you?” I ask.
>
“No, but I was wondering if he called work. I thought maybe he’d lost my cell number.”
“No, he didn’t call,” I say, irritated.
“I wonder if he’s all right.”
“I’m sure he is.”
“I almost called his son. His email address and office phone are on his department’s website.”
“I think it’s good that you didn’t.”
“I was so sad that he stood me up. That’s never happened before. Has it ever happened to you?”
“Yes. Once.”
“Were you crushed?”
“I suppose I was.”
“What happened?”
“It was Tim. I should have known then that he’d be the wrong man to marry. It was our second date. He told me the next day that he’d called and left a message on my machine the night before saying we’d have to reschedule, but there was no message. He stood me up to go to a Bulls game with some buddies who called at the last minute and said that they had an extra ticket.”
“What an asshole.”
“I know, but at the time, I refused to believe it.”
“Do you want to come over and have dinner with us tonight? It might help put Ben in a better mood. He thinks you’re cute.”
How nice she is to say this, whether or not it’s true. “I don’t know,” I say. “Wouldn’t another night be better?”
“Oh, come on. Ben’s fine. He’s not mad at me anymore. I’ll make hamburgers and cook up some hash browns. The way I make them, they’re pretty amazing.”
My aunt is already ensconced in her easy chair in front of the TV, watching some old movie with white guys in face paint playing the Indians; she’s eating pickled herring from a jar and carrot sticks for dinner. I was planning to read and watch a movie too, or maybe go out to one by myself. Most of my friends in town are married with kids, or else they travel on weekends to other cities to see their lovers (or else host them here). I’m from suburban Chicago, not Iowa City, but I went to college here and eventually met Tim here, and I haven’t left, not even for a little while, despite the divorce and faltering job market. I want to go to Rachel and Ben’s place, but I also know that it’s unlikely Ben will be in the right mood to entertain me or anyone else.
Even so, my boredom or loneliness, or maybe it’s fear of becoming a woman much like my solitary aunt (who is kindhearted but sits home most days and watches too much television and has never traveled beyond the Midwest except for two trips to San Francisco with a man who didn’t end up proposing in 1965), wins out over reason. “I’m on a diet,” I tell Rachel, “but all right, I’ll come over. I can only eat salad though. I’ll bring it.”
“Okay,” she says. “If you insist. This’ll be fun, Marcie. I promise.”
They live about two miles from me, in a brick apartment complex with a dozen units. Theirs is on the second floor, and when Rachel buzzes me in, the first thing I notice in the hallway is the overwhelming smell of buttered popcorn. My stomach leaps, always hopeful, and I know then, salad or no, that I’m going to eat everything they put in front of me, and seconds too. I feel more defiance than dread, even as I notice my thighs chafing against the seams of my jeans. Still, I could probably run a marathon too. I could be like Ben and start training and burn down the fat cells my body doggedly persists in carrying from one day to the next. And maybe I will. Maybe if I change my routines and the way I look, my life will be better. I will find a new job and a nicer man than Tim, one who will not stop for pizza on his way home from work when he knows that I’m making us something special for dinner, one who will not sleep with his much younger co-worker and leave me for her before leaving her for one of her even more-dimwitted friends. Maybe I will run and run and it will clear my mind of all the self-doubt and angry grudges and petty fears, and I will become a better judge of character and also find the guts to tell the crank callers just where to stick it when they ask if I’ve ever tried soaping my “boobs and beaver” with Sunshine dish liquid. Maybe I will become so healthy and cute that a promoter for an energy bar formulated specifically for middle-aged women will see me at a race and ask if I want to be their new spokesmodel.
These things happen. Apparently they do.
Ben answers the door in khaki shorts and a Cubs T-shirt, his dark blond hair falling in his eyes. He is so good-looking that I feel nervous and sweaty-palmed the second I see him. He smiles and leans in close, but I pull back until I realize that he’s trying to kiss my cheek, both of us laughing a little. He smells wonderfully of mint-scented shaving cream; it has been so long since I’ve gotten close enough to a man to smell his freshly shaven face that I have to stop myself from asking him to stay where he is for a few seconds longer. “Thanks for coming, Marcie,” he says after he manages to kiss my cheek. “I hope you’re not allergic to cats. Did Rachel tell you that we have two?”
“I’m not allergic at all. I love cats.”
“Good, because they’re not like most cats. They’re actually friendly and will demand that you pet them.”
“What are their names?”
“June and Myra.”
“That’s so cute,” I say.
“They’re my grandmothers’ names. I think the lazy beasts are on the couch in the living room. You can go in and join them if you don’t mind. Rachel’s finishing up in the kitchen.”
“Does she need any help?”
He shakes his head. “No, we’re almost ready.”
I give him the salad I’ve brought, and with a dimpled smile, he takes it and disappears into the kitchen. The cats are both curled up on a forest green couch that dominates the living room, right where Ben said they would be. The living room also appears to be the dining room; a card table has been set up a few feet from the sofa, with plates and forks already arranged on it. I stand for a moment and look at June and Myra, both of them peering back at me impassively. They are pretty cats with thick, healthy-looking fur, one gray-striped, the other solid black. The black one yawns and squeaks adorably as she does, then closes her eyes, having decided that I don’t need further monitoring.
“Marcie,” Rachel calls from the kitchen. “What do you want to drink? We have Rolling Rock and Coke.”
“Coke,” I say. “Diet if you have it.”
“There’s only regular.”
“That’s fine.”
She brings the Coke half a minute later and whispers, “He called. He said one of his dogs was sick and he had to take her to the vet. He wants us to meet tomorrow instead.”
“He does? Do you believe his excuse?”
“I don’t know if I do, but I told him that I thought I’d be able to meet him.”
“Do you really want to give him another chance to stand you up?” I set the Coke on the table. “I don’t know why you want to risk losing Ben for some stranger who called to ask if he could use Powerhouse soap to spot-clean his sofa.”
“Are the hash browns done?” Ben calls from the kitchen. “They look like they’re starting to burn.”
“Take them off the stove,” Rachel yells. “They’re done.” She looks at me and whispers, “I’m not sure if I’m going yet. Ben wants to drive up to Cedar Rapids for a concert at Coe College tomorrow afternoon. I told him last week that I’d go.”
“You should. Jack can stick it.”
“Ben will need the car, but I could take the bus or ride my bike to meet him.”
“That’s hardly the issue.”
“I know. I’m still thinking it over.”
Ben comes in with a platter of hash browns and my salad bowl and sets them on the table next to my Coke. Both cats jump down from the sofa and run over to him, the black one leaping up to paw his leg. “This isn’t for you, Junie,” he says. “You little glutton. You already ate.” June meows and Myra stands mutely, tail swishing, staring up at him with her glowing green eyes. My aunt had a cat for a while but he was a foul-tempered codger named Dragonfly who hissed if you got within ten feet of him. When she had to put him down last s
pring, I felt bad for her, but not so much for him.
“Stop it, you two,” Rachel says, shooing the cats back to the sofa. They actually listen, but while we eat, I can feel them staring at us, an occasional pitiful meow escaping their furry throats.
Rachel chatters about a night class in basic photography that she’s thinking of taking at the high school, and Ben tells us about his plan to make a CD of the songs he’s been working on for the last couple of years and his attempts to get second graders to play the recorder without one of them hitting an ear-splitting note for an entire round of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” The age difference between us is only eight years, but I feel a lot older and much more tired than they seem to. I don’t know if either of them has any idea of the disappointments coming their way—ones they will suffer as a couple, as aspiring artists, and maybe as parents, if they make it that far. I look at Rachel, at her animated, pretty face, no wrinkles yet that I can see. I look at Ben, too, his surfer beauty so rare for our small Midwestern city, and before I can stop myself, I glance at Rachel again and say, “Don’t go tomorrow. Just don’t.”
She stares at me, alarmed. Her eyes widen in a silent plea.
Ben is bewildered. “Don’t go where? To Coe College? Did Rachel tell you we were planning to see a concert up there?”
My face is burning. “No,” I croak. “I mean, don’t go in to work if Mr. Lambert calls and asks you to fill in for Cassie like I did today.”
Rachel is still staring at me, but Ben laughs and says, “No, she won’t go in if he calls. I won’t let her.”
“We could use the money,” she says, recovering herself. “If he calls, I should go in.”
I realize then that I have just inadvertently given her an alibi—she can tell Ben that she is going to work to cover for Cassie and even have him drop her off before he goes to his concert in Cedar Rapids, and then she can have Jack the lonely-heart beagle lover pick her up and take her to the Olive Garden or the Motel 6 or wherever it is he plans to take her.
“I thought we’d already made up our minds to go to Cedar Rapids and have dinner up there too,” says Ben.
The Virginity of Famous Men Page 10