by Lauren Fox
I have brought Kevin to this sad, sad question; all these weeks, he has been watching my receding shadow and wondering, Is she gone for good? What’s left of my heart—that drained, sickly creature, that brown, dying insect—crawls up through my chest cavity, into my throat, and lurches out of my mouth. There it is, on the sidewalk, skittering away, looking for a better home. There’s nothing but hollowness inside me now, nothing but a vacant lot, a patch of dead grass, maybe a FOR RENT sign rotting in the ground.
What is the answer? My brain is frozen. I still want to be married to you, but I might be carrying someone else’s child? I don’t want to be married to you, but I don’t want to cause you pain, either, so let’s just stay together and nobody will get hurt? Will you want to stay married to me after you find out what I’ve done—what I’m still doing? I’m so sorry. My skin—all of it, the entire outer layer of me—seems to tighten, as if someone is pulling on me from the back. I do the only thing I can possibly do under the circumstances. I pretend I didn’t hear him. “Come on,” I say, spotting a small space between cars and stepping into the street. “Now’s our chance.” Without waiting for a reply, I dash halfway across, with about two inches to spare between me and a speeding Geo Metro. I pause for a second on the yellow dividing line in the middle of the road. I can feel the hot whoosh of wind from the oncoming traffic. I calculate fast whether I can make it ahead of the blue minivan that’s barreling down Oakland, or whether I should wait. I glance back at Kevin, who has not followed me. He’s still there, on the sidewalk, watching me, cautious, waiting. The steady stream of traffic between us shows no sign of abating. I turn away from him and decide to make a run for it ahead of the minivan. In the blink of an eye, I go. I run so fast my feet barely touch the ground. I run so fast I fly to the other side.
IT’S BEEN A WEEK SINCE DICK’S FUNERAL, AND I’VE HAD a million opportunities to take the test—which I bought last Saturday, which lurks in the back of the linen closet, scary-monster-like, waiting for me—but I haven’t done it. I keep feeling like I’m about to get my period: I’m bloated, my boobs are sore, and I’m irritable as hell. But, according to my stealthy online research, these are signs of early pregnancy, too. “Hey, if you’re a few weeks pregnant and you feel like crap, don’t worry,” YoMama.com advises. “Things will only get worse!”
It’s Friday, and David and I are meeting at White’s. He e-mailed last night and suggested the café, rather than our usual rendezvous spot, his bed. “I’m still swamped with work,” he wrote. “But I need to see you.” So here I am, sitting at the same table where we had our first date, watching the same people in their colorful coats hurrying in breathlessly for their midmorning coffees, feeling the same way I felt on that fateful Friday two months ago—like vomiting—but quite possibly for a different reason.
I’m biting my nails again, too, just like last time, when David ducks in the door. When I see him, I quickly pull my thumb out of my mouth, and a bit of cuticle rips off; I stare for a second as blood oozes out.
“Hi,” David whispers, pulling a chair up close to mine. He looks overworked and grim. I hadn’t decided ahead of time what I was going to say to him. On the one hand, it’s probably better to offer up potentially life-changing news when you know for sure that it’s true. Why torture him with, David, my period’s late, when I could go home and find out in a matter of minutes what that means—when all it might mean is that my period’s late? On the other hand, it’s as much his problem as it is mine. At least, it ought to be. Is it? I don’t know. If there’s a rule book for this kind of situation, nobody’s shown it to me. It’s probably in that aisle at Walgreen’s. Now that I see David, his tired eyes, his unshaven face, sympathy for him suggests that I should spare him the uncertainty. But something else, stronger, tugs at me to tell him quickly, now.
“David, I—”
“I need to say something to you,” he interrupts, reaching for both of my hands and setting them gently on the table, covering them with his. I love his hands. They’re broad, almost square, but with long, surprisingly delicate fingers. Just the feel of them, on top of mine, makes me shiver.
“Okay, well, I need to tell you something, too,” I say. He pulls his right hand away and I notice the blood from my cuticle smeared on his fingertip. I’m about to point it out to him, but something in the way he’s looking at me turns my words into ice.
“What I need to say is,” he starts, pulling his left hand away, too, leaving my poor hands naked on the table, “I can’t. Because you’re…I mean…” He’s got his palms squeezed up against the sides of his head now, as if he’s physically holding his skull together. He sighs. “I practiced saying this, believe it or not.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me,” I say quietly, even though I’m beginning to.
He waits for a long time, and then he says, “It’s that you’re married, Emily.”
I can practically feel the porcupine quills poke out through my skin. “Well, that’s not exactly—” breaking news, I’m about to say, but he interrupts again.
“It’s that you’re married, and I’m not the kind of person who has an affair. With someone who’s married. That’s not the kind of person I am.” David hasn’t taken his jacket off, I notice, as if he wants to be able to make a fast escape. “Well, it’s not the kind of person I thought I was.” This is the man I’ve been having an affair with for the past six weeks. This is the man I ate chocolate pudding off of a few days ago. “I’m…I was…crazy about you,” he says, “but.” He lets go of his head. What about the pudding? Didn’t that pudding mean anything to you? “Really crazy about you. But,” he says again. He’s become very repetitive all of a sudden. I would like to mention this to him. You’ve become quite repetitive, I would say, in the immortal words of Len Ross, and you’re repeating yourself! “You’re married,” he continues, a doctor giving bad news to a terminal patient, “and this feels wrong. It’s felt wrong the whole time, Emily. Don’t you think it has?” He says it like it’s an urgent request. If I feel the same way, then David is off the hook. I don’t, though. I don’t! But before I can answer, he barrels on. “I love being with you, in a lot of ways.” My stomach lurches again. I press my fingers onto the surface of the table and swallow hard. What I want to do most right now is throw up. “But more and more, as time goes on, I just feel guilty. Morally compromised.” I’m just looking at him, memorizing his face. I wonder if he practiced that phrase, “morally compromised,” on the way over. It sounds a little bit mean.
“Well,” I say. It comes out a croak. Later, I’m sure, I will have a million responses to David’s breakup speech—and this, clearly, is what I am on the receiving end of, a breakup speech—but right now it’s all I can do to keep the contents of my stomach approximately where they should be, to breathe, not to let David see me cry, and to keep my heart from exploding into shards in my chest. That’s one good thing, I suppose: it turns out I still do have a heart. Just my luck. “I guess you’re a better person than I am,” I say in the most sarcastic voice I can muster. But then, as I say it, we both realize that it’s probably true, and David flashes me the most sympathetic, hangdog look, such a striking admission of our ethical inequality, that I practically gasp. Morally compromised, he said.
I get up so fast, I knock my chair over. He might have his jacket on, but I’m going to be the one to leave first. That’ll show him! I pick up my chair with a clatter and shove it under the table. “Hey, buster,” I say too loudly. “If you’re so hung up on ethics, it wasn’t very ethical of you to break up with me in a coffee shop!” Any second now, my head’s going to spin all the way around. I know I’m not making sense. It just strikes me as a bit unnecessary to break up with someone in a coffee shop. In my favorite coffee shop! Who’s morally compromised now? “Who’s morally compromised now?” I’m going to leave on a high note, albeit an insane one. I’m going to leave on a note so high it shatters glass. I hurriedly shove my arms through the sleeves of my coat, re
alizing in a muddle that it’s upside down. I wrench myself out of it and try, in a last-ditch effort for a dignified exit, to drape it over my shoulder.
“Emily, wait.” David is standing up now, too, and not knocking anything over in the process, either. Damn the jacket that he never took off.
“No,” I say. “Wait for what?” In about two seconds, I’ll be crying. I need to get out of here.
Now, finally, David looks as sad and confused as I feel. He grabs me by the wrist as I’m trying to flee. “Shouldn’t we talk about this?”
I freeze in my tracks. “Talk about it?” David holds on to my wrist and pulls me slightly nearer. I’m suddenly aware of the other people in the coffee shop. If I glanced around, I’m sure I’d see them staring at us. I’m going to have to find a new favorite coffee shop. “Outside,” I hiss.
I manage to get my coat on and maneuver around the tables and out the door without tripping over my shoelaces or falling over a chair. The November air—back to normal now and cold—is a shock in my lungs. David is a half step behind me as I hurry away from White’s.
“Stop, please, Emily,” David says. If he grabs me again, I’m going to clock him. I do stop, though, and I turn to him. We’re a half block from White’s, away from people, in front of Metropolitan Bank. “Can we sit?” he asks, motioning to a green bench. I want to flee, but I have to stay. A tiny, hopeful voice in my head whispers: Maybe he’s going to say he doesn’t mean it. Maybe he already regrets this fiasco. So I sit, knowing that that high voice lies. Away from the scene of the crime, at least, I no longer feel quite as much like crying. We’re out of the sun, in the shadow of the bank’s awning, and I realize just how cold it is. David sits next to me, close, and I inch away, hugging my arms around me.
I shake my head. “You’re breaking up with me. Honestly, what else is there to talk about?” My words wisp away in the air.
He leans forward, his elbows on his knees, and looks straight ahead. I glance at the profile I could draw in my sleep: the dark hair that falls across his forehead, his slightly crooked nose, the lips that are almost too gorgeous to belong to a man. “I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to explain.”
My emotions are swinging back and forth so fast they could create their own energy source. I’m terribly sad. I’m calm and resigned. I’m furious. I’m definitely furious! I hear a snort come out of my mouth and I sit straight up. “David, you’ve already indicated that our relationship has weakened your value system. What now? Do you want to describe just how dreadful you feel about sleeping with me?” I dig around in my purse for a pen and hold it up to him triumphantly. “Do you want to draw me a graph?”
But David just sits there. He won’t take the bait, won’t give me the satisfaction of a good argument. At least if we were shouting at each other, we’d be in it together. “I’m really sorry,” he says. He’s still staring straight ahead, and his voice is low and quiet. He’s speaking slowly, carefully. It’s as if he’s searching inside himself to talk to me. Even in my heartbreak and confusion I can see that. “I was so excited when we got together. So excited about getting to know you. You know, because we were…” He brightens for a second. “But then things started to go south for me. As much as I…maybe I…loved you…” He takes a deep breath, exhales fast. I feel my eyes start to sting, and I swallow hard. “I just, I started to think about what we were doing. I mean, this is really wrong, Emily. Don’t you ever think about that?” Without waiting for me to answer, he continues. “It started to feel sour. I started to feel awful. And that’s how I’ve been feeling.”
“For how long?” I ask.
“A few weeks.”
I want to say, “But I don’t love Kevin! I love you!” I want to fall down at David’s feet and cry, “I’ll do whatever it takes to make it better. I’ll leave Kevin.” But even as I’m thinking them, those words feel fake and hollow, scripted, what Spurned Lover tragically exclaims in the breakup scene, because even as I’m thinking them, I’m getting over this, in a weird way, like I can see myself two months from now, and I am not still mourning David. But at the same time, my throat is closing up and tears are pricking my eyes, because, right now, Jesus, this hurts. And then I remember that I could be pregnant. I’m married, I’ve been cheating on my husband, I’m possibly pregnant, and I’ve just been dumped. I think I’m actually laughing from the sheer horrible absurdity of it when I turn around, toward the bank, and that’s when I see Kevin standing against the building, about six feet from our bench. From the look on his face, he’s been there for a while.
“I’ve never seen anyone so calm,” I say, my head buried under the covers. “Never.” I think I’ve said the same thing five or six times now, but it just keeps coming out of my mouth. I’m in the freshly painted guest room at Meg and Steve’s, huddled, freezing, under four heavy blankets. I can’t get warm. But I’m going to have to emerge from this nest before too long; the oxygen is running out.
“What did he say?” Meg asks patiently, wearily. She’s sitting on a hard-backed chair next to the bed. I hear her shift, hear the rustle of fabric. She’s been trying for the last hour to get the story out of me, but I’ve been incapable of narrative. All I can do is hold out shards of my shattered life to her to glimpse, from within my increasingly poisonous little cocoon.
“Okay,” I say, shoving my head out into the air, breathing, finally. The room smells of paint. The walls are dark green, a color called “Reverie.” I helped Meg pick it. I wonder what color “Infidelity” would be. Probably red, or fuchsia. Something jarring. Something compelling, something with repercussions; ultimately you’d know every time you looked at your walls: a mistake. “Here’s how it went.” I look at my overnight bag lying open in the corner. After the episode in front of the bank with David and Kevin, I staggered home, threw what I thought were a few essentials into my suitcase, and headed over here. I must have been in a trance: all I managed to pack were four pairs of underwear and three sweaters I never wear anymore. No bras, no socks, no shirts, no pants. “I turned around, and Kevin just glared at me. There was hatred in his eyes. And ice. He was so calm.” Oops, I already said that. I take a big breath again, then a sip of water from the glass on the night-stand; the water tastes vaguely like paint. “He said, ‘I thought so.’ I thought so. He knew. And you know, I knew he knew, and a part of me must have wanted him to know, because I obviously didn’t have the guts to tell him, so I’m almost glad he knew, glad he knows, even though I’m not sure if I really wanted him to know or not, you know?”
“No,” Meg says, shaking her head. “Sweetie.” She rests her hand on the lump under the covers that is my knee. She shakes her head again. “I’ll tell you, I’m at a loss.”
“And David,” I say with a gulp, reliving the whole squalid scene again. I must have started when I saw Kevin; I must have moved or tensed or jerked, because just then I noticed with horror that David was moving toward me on the bench, like he was about to comfort me; he was reaching out for me, and I heard myself say, quietly, sternly, “Please don’t hug me in front of my husband.” And then David looked at me, a cartoon of himself, his features practically rearranged from the shock, and he swiveled around, and his eyes met Kevin’s, and then he looked down, flushed, and right then I knew: that was it for us; it was all over, because nobody can feel that much naked shame and still have desire left over, or even much affection. He whispered, “Oh, my God,” but it wasn’t directed at me; his dismay wasn’t meant to be shared; it was private and horrible, and we were separate.
Meg is silent for a minute, then suddenly smacks her hand against her forehead and says, “Ohhh!”
“What?”
“I never understood quite why it was so awkward when you ran into David in front of the school back in October! Now I get it!” The look of comprehension on her face fades and turns back to incredulity. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”
I can’t quite believe any of this, the mess of my life, the aftermath of the hurricane. I
’m not even sure if there are any survivors, including myself. Kevin stood against the bank building, his hands shaking, his nostrils slightly flared. There were no other indications that he’d just overheard me, just the subtle, contained variations of Kevin. But he had heard. He stared at David for a long time as if David were somebody he thought he recognized. And then Kevin looked at me and he said, “I thought so,” and then he turned and he left. “He left,” I say to Meg. “He didn’t even wait for any kind of explanation; he didn’t yell at me or hit David or do any of the things you might think a betrayed husband would do.” “Cuckolded,” is the word. What color would that be? An awful orange. A color you could hardly even look at. And at the thought of that, I finally, finally start to cry.
Meg once told me that sometimes, at her school, one student will deliberately hurt another one, hit or bite or scratch another kid, and then, unaccountably, the malicious little rug rat who caused the injury will start to cry. And when that happens, Meg will take that child aside and gently tell her that she has to stop crying, that she hurt someone, and so she has to be a big girl, and stop crying, and say she’s sorry. Because, Meg told me, if you’re the one who inflicts the pain, it’s not fair to start crying. It’s not fair to weep for sympathy when it’s apologizing that you ought to be doing. That’s what I’m thinking about now, as I’m bawling uncontrollably, as I’m sobbing on Meg’s sympathetic shoulder, drenching her pretty pink shirt with my murderer’s tears.