“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” she said, pulling nervously at strands of her brown pageboy. “I was worried.”
He wanted to slice open her belly and pull strands of intestines out by the fistful. Instead, he said he’d slept with her best friend, whom she always joked had a crush on him.
“Dana and I were kicking it on and off for pretty much the whole last year you and I were together,” he said. “I was going to give her up when we got married, but she’s a fabulous lay.”
Without a word Beth left, shoulders slumped and defeated. He wanted to slouch her even more, to pound her into the ground. So he called Dana and made it as true as possible.
Connor didn’t see Beth Martin again for four years, not until she walked into Café Paridiso for the coffee that Laine set up but couldn’t attend because she had to work.
When Beth walked through the door shaking rain off the collar of a violet peacoat, he almost didn’t recognize her. Not because she looked any different, but because she looked exactly the same, he’d just forgotten, remembering only her back, her hunched shoulders, and the hatred that made his fingers shake. Unlike Laine, who was aggressively attractive with the classic bones of a statue in the Art Institute, Beth was pretty in the most unassuming brown-eyed way. And like those dogs they’d studied in freshman psych, Connor remembered exactly how it felt to be in love with her. Remembered she used to rub her feet together before she fell asleep, that she wrapped herself in warm sheets when they came out of the dryer, the way her belly button had a slightly musty smell.
“Conn?” Beth asked. “Who would have thought we’d both end up in Boston?”
“Yeah, everyone in this city calls me ‘Kahnah.’ ” He stood up, and she gave him a quick hug; she was easily a foot shorter than him. “So you’re a doctor now or something?”
“Or something.” She shrugged, rolled wide eyes, smiled at Jorie. “Is this your little girl?” Beth held out her fingers for Jorie to squeeze, and looked up at Connor. “She’s so cute. I can’t believe she’s yours.”
“Hey.”
“No, I mean, I knew you’d have a beautiful kid; I just can’t believe you have a kid.”
But Connor knew what she meant: she couldn’t believe he had a kid that wasn’t hers.
It’s pouring rain, and Laine is already late to get Jorie from her mother’s when she leaves her office on Market Street, still she goes completely out of her way back to her apartment. She tells herself she’s going to get clean underwear and a change of clothes, but the only thing she takes is a shoebox of Connor’s old photos they unearthed the year before while moving from their last crummy apartment to their current crummy apartment.
Pulling the car into the parking lot of a White Hen Pantry, Laine thumbs through the pictures. Most of the shots are Beth and Connor in L.L. Bean outerwear—apparently the two of them did nothing in college but ski and have snowball fights on the campus lawns. But there is one shot of Connor on a bed with the paisley coverlet in all hotels. Even though he’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt and Laine knows he and Beth never had sex, the photo is decidedly postcoital. Half on his stomach, half on his side, something between surprise and a smile is on his lips, black eyes unfocused, like Beth whipped the camera out of a travel bag without warning. This is what Laine wanted to see—what it looks like for her husband to be in love with someone else.
Laine sets the box of photos on the wet asphalt in the parking lot, leaving it to confuse the next person stopping for cigarettes and soda. As she drives, fighting Big Dig construction and sheets of rain, she wonders for the first time in twenty-six years if her father loved any of those women. Wonders if that makes any difference.
“Ma, I’m really sorry,” she says preemptively in the doorway, when she finally gets back and lets herself in.
“Jorie’s with Connor.” At the top of the stairs, her mother shakes her head. “He came by looking for you, but you didn’t answer when we tried your cell. He waited around, but Jorie was hungry, so he took her to get something to eat.”
“What?” White-hot anger burns Laine’s lungs. “You just let him take her, just like that? God, for once I really thought that you would be on my side. Just this one fucking time.”
And then she’s running up the stairs to her childhood bedroom, grabbing her deodorant and makeup from the dresser, and shoving them back into her gym bag.
“There aren’t sides here,” her mother is saying. “You said you’d be home by noon, it was going on three. He’s her father; she wanted to go with him. What did you want me to do?”
Laine realizes it’s a perfectly legitimate question. If her childhood taught her anything, it’s that children shouldn’t be used as pawns in their parent’s disasters. But she wants to be nine years old again to tell her father yes when her mother kicks him out and he asks Laine if she wants to go with him.
“Wait, where are you going?” Caroline’s hand grazes Laine’s shoulder as she runs past her down the stairs.
“I’m going where I should have gone in the first place,” Laine says. “To Daddy’s.”
Connor hadn’t realized Laine was someone he could love until the night he tripped over her on his way to pee. It was four in the morning, but she was on hands and knees scrubbing the splintered floors in her apartment.
“What are you doing,” he asked, squatting next to her. “Don’t you have a big test tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” she said, cheeks red—the first time in the two months they’d been sleeping together that he’d seen her embarrassed about anything. “I just do this when I get nervous.”
It might have been biological, OCD or something fixable with a pill, but it was the first crack she’d let him see, the first time he thought of her as a person and not some perfect droid.
It wasn’t until half a year later, when Laine was six months pregnant, that he realized he did love her. It was the middle of winter, but the heat in their apartment couldn’t be adjusted, so it was perpetually ninety-six degrees. They spent a lot of time languishing on each other on the futon. With her head in his lap, she looked like a dying queen ant, twig arms and legs protruding in all directions from her huge, round stomach.
“Baby, let’s go out to dinner.” Laine looked up from one of his heavy books on social policy—she’d started off editing his thesis but by that point was pretty much writing it. “I want you to eat a steak for me.”
“If you want a steak, I’ll take you to get a steak.” Connor smiled down at her. “But I’m not gonna torture you by eating one in front of you.”
“Please.” She pushed plump lips into a pout. “I just want to be around meat.”
He took her to Smith & Wollensky, where the waitress’s annoyance became apparent when the two of them got iced tea instead of alcohol and Laine ordered a baked potato and creamed spinach. His filet au poivre came out tender and bloody. Since dating Laine, he’d only had steak once, when his brother came to visit, and he’d forgotten the sheer joy of meat. With the first taste, he actually sighed. Gray eyes lean and hungry, Laine watched him chew.
“Just take some.” He held a piece on the end of his fork. “The cow’s already dead, and he’d understand it’s your hormones.”
“Put it in your mouth,” Laine said, breathing heavy, pink flush on pale cheeks. “Don’t chew too much, then kiss me.”
They were next to each other in a little romantic booth, and she slipped her tongue between his lips, licked juice and pepper off his teeth, sucked the meat. Sliding her hand under the table, she reached for his cock poking through his corduroy pants. The annoyed waitress walked by pretending not to notice.
“Men’s room,” Laine whispered, hand still on his crotch. “I’ll meet you there in a minute.”
They’d fucked in public bathrooms before, but her changing body made them clumsy. He could hardly lift her, and her swollen stomach created an odd distance between them. Stumbling, he knocked her head against the stall. Laine laughed; Connor cried. That was the mome
nt.
“Baby, it’s okay, I’m fine.” Laine ran fingers through his hair, looked at him nervously. “It didn’t even hurt.”
He shook his head, put his palm on her belly, tried to think of a way to say what seemed unsayable.
“I’m just so grateful we’re doing this.” He knew she hated syrupy displays of emotion, but he needed to plow through it. “I feel, I don’t know, blessed.”
After he calmed down, Laine made a joke about how he was going to lose it in the delivery room (he didn’t), but for a good fifteen minutes she just held his head while he sobbed in the restroom.
“Thank you,” he said, again and again, into breasts she didn’t normally have.
Turning off the ignition at Rosen Motors, Laine closes her eyes, waits for the rain to let up a little. When someone knocks on her window, she expects her father or one of the sales guys with an umbrella, but it’s Connor, dripping wet, black hair molded into peaks on his forehead.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, but he twists up his palms indicating he can’t hear her. Surprisingly, she isn’t angry, but terrified. Terrified because Connor looks the same as always. There’s the same faint scar on the left side of his forehead, the same right turn of his nose. Somehow she’d expected him to morph into something else since making it out of their bathroom, to have become someone entirely different. She rolls the window down a crack. “Where’s Jorie?”
Connor lowers his head to the slit of space, and windblown water sprays Laine’s face.
“She’s inside with your dad,” he says. “I’ve been looking for you for hours. Please talk to me.”
Through the glass window of the showroom and the hard rain, Laine can see her father, Jorie in the crook of his arm. He’s waiting to come rescue her if she needs to be rescued.
“I don’t feel like talking,” she says.
“Lainey, please open the door.”
She shakes her head.
“I have the keys.” He pulls a chain from his jeans’ pocket, sticks it in the lock.
Like a cornered spider, she backs into the passenger seat. Just as Connor opens the door, she jumps out the other side and runs into the lot of new Volkswagens and Audis. On his stomach and elbows, Connor crawls into the car, over the seats and console, and out of the passenger-side door. Even though she doesn’t want to, Laine laughs. But she starts running as he climbs out of the car. She runs; he chases. Around a Passat, though a row of Eurovans. She stops at the rear end of a Jetta, Connor at the front. He moves toward her, and she runs to a blue Beetle and rests her palms on the rounded hood.
“Wait, please,” Connor yells, words garbled from the rain, but sincere as always.
She ducks behind a TT. He follows, and she starts running again. Crying and laughing from car to car. Within seconds her hair is wet and heavy around her face. Frigid air stabs her lungs as she splashes in puddles and muddy water seeps through her leather pumps and nylons. Coat and suit jacket in the car, Laine feels the thin fabric of her camisole mold around her nipples. And she runs like she hasn’t run since high school track, since she ran away from her parents’ crumbling marriage, ran out of her baby fat, ran out of Providence. Connor chases her down a row of convertibles. There’s a mesh fence blocking her in, nowhere left for her to go. She turns, and he grabs her wrist.
“Lainey, talk to me please,” he says between heaving gasps for air. “Just give me a chance to make it up to you. Don’t do this to our family.”
“You did this,” she says, looking at the cars, her arm, everywhere but his eyes, because she’s sure her mother has said that exact line before. “This, us—it was working for me, and I don’t want to hear all the things that are wrong that made you do this. I don’t want to know that you always loved her more.”
“Of course not. Maybe we can go away next weekend, just the two of us—to Nassau or some other warm place.”
She concentrates hard on the asphalt lot.
“Or maybe we could take Jorie to Disney World,” he says. “It wouldn’t be crowded this time of year, just get away with our family.”
“Connor.” He’s still holding her wrist, but it’s a gentle pressure she could shake off. “It’s not like we can ride Space Mountain and you can unfuck that girl.”
“I know, I just don’t want this to be the end, and we need to start somewhere.”
His voice catches, and she can’t not look at him anymore. He rubs his wet eyes with raw hands.
“Your teeth are chattering,” he says. “Let’s go inside and talk.”
She realizes her teeth are chattering and she’s freezing. It can’t be more than thirty-five degrees out, and the rain is chunked with ice. Connor is shaking, too, his breath coming out as white clouds.
“I don’t—” She stops because she isn’t sure where she wants the sentence to take them.
Leaning in, he starts to put his arms around her, then stops and holds her shoulders, a foot of rain and air and her parents’ failed marriage between them.
“God, you’re so beautiful,” he says, blue lips trembling from the cold and because he loves her. Even if he could stick his cock in someone else, she’s still the best plan he has.
His eyelids droop, and she knows he’s going to kiss her.
She could stop him. If she leaves him she could find someone else, or she doesn’t need to find anyone at all. She has two degrees from Harvard and cheekbones to cut glass. She doesn’t have to stick around and become bitter for the reasons her mother stuck around, the reasons that have kept women stuck and bitter throughout history. And she knows this game too well. If she kisses him, he’ll be sorry for a while, be crazy good to her for a while, but it will happen again and again. Everything she has done her entire life has been in preparation for this moment, to not kiss him back. But she’s freezing and he’s freezing. When his lips touch hers, she opens her mouth and lets him loop his arms around her. Wrapping her long arms around him, they hold each other until they stop trembling.
Beth Martin initially felt good in Connor’s arms that first afternoon after the coffee shop. It was as if some astrological wrong had been righted—he’d finally had sex with Beth Martin. Almost immediately that karmic soundness was replaced with a terrific pain that seemed to stem from the base of his spine and radiate to his toes and scalp.
“I can’t believe we did this.” Beth rolled over to face him, her enormous eyes wet. “I talked to your wife on the phone last week, and you have that beautiful little girl. This isn’t like us.”
She was so sweet, so cute; it seemed impossible that he ever hated her or thought of her as anything other than warm and wonderful. He wanted to take her guilt away, so he kissed her forehead, her nose, her throat.
“It’s just . . . I thought about you every day for four years,” she said. “I don’t know that I ever stopped loving you.”
Something in his chest snapped then, and he made love to her again, almost because it hurt. They kept at it for six weeks, even though it made them both miserable. Beth developed a nervous blink; Connor couldn’t sleep, jumped at all shadows and chewed the tops off his pens. Somehow it made him love Laine more—martyr Laine who compromised all her beliefs to work at a giant evil finance firm so he could work for Massachusetts Reads and they could still eat; beautiful Laine, on her knees scrubbing floors, forever fucked up from her parents’ divorce.
He knew things had reached a critical low point when he called his brother in Chicago for advice. As an orphaned teenager, Connor had been disgusted by the revolving door of Jack’s bedroom and the steady stream of girls sipping coffee in the kitchen in the mornings. But six weeks into his affair, nails gnawed to the quick, Connor found himself dialing his brother’s office.
“Have you cheated on Mona since you got married?” Connor asked.
“What?”
“Have you been unfaithful?”
“Are you asking for me or for you?” Jack sighed. “Look, kid, if you’re calling for me to condone fucking around
on your wife, it’s not like I can give you some green light. Do what you have to do. But you like your kid, you like Laine. You made choices.”
That was what he told Beth, later that afternoon while they sat in his Nissan Sentra in a Twin Donut parking lot, words muted by buckets of rain.
“We made choices,” he said, and watched her try to hold things together.
“Of course, you’re right,” she said, but she was talking to her Nikes.
A week went by, and Connor started thinking everything might not have to come avalanching down, that maybe Laine would never have to find out. Then Beth Martin came up to him in the grocery store, and Connor was pretty sure the stabbing pain in his chest was a heart attack. His father had been fifty-five when he’d had his first, but Connor was convinced he was going to die at twenty-five, on the linoleum floor of Star Market, while his wife examined prepackaged California rolls and his daughter sat in the shopping cart eating an organic oatmeal cookie.
“Conn? I thought that was you.” Beth touched his arm. “And you must be Laine? We spoke on the phone that time.”
It took a lot not to throw up or fall down, but somehow Connor negotiated an introduction between the two women. Laine apologized for missing coffee and talked to Beth about children’s hospitals because Laine knew about everything, even hospitals. Connor leaned on the handle of the cart and shook his head no when Jorie offered part of her cookie.
“We should all get together and have dinner sometime, right, Conn?” His vision was actually blurring. Lower body loose as gravy, he couldn’t even tell who was talking—Laine? Beth? Jorie? Probably not Jorie.
Mercifully the conversation ended. Telling Laine they needed olive oil, he cornered Beth in an aisle of imported Italian foods.
“You don’t live anywhere near here.” Connor grabbed Beth’s arm. “You’re not freaking Glenn Close. You can’t stalk me.”
“You know I’m not like that.”
Family and Other Accidents Page 13