Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties: A Novel

by Camille Pagán

  “Watch out, or I’m going to start asking you to make me dinner,” I teased.

  Charlie had just begun to pour water into the mugs, but he set the kettle aside and placed his hands on my thighs.

  Without thinking, I leaned forward and kissed him. After a moment, his lips moved from my own to my neck, and then to my collarbone, and down to the V of my blouse. “Is this okay?” he asked quietly, his lips still on my skin.

  “I’m not sure,” I said softly. I wanted him to tear my shirt off when I should have been telling him to stop. “I don’t know how to do this.”

  “It’s like riding a bike.”

  “I don’t actually know how to ride a bike. I never learned.”

  “I’ll teach you,” he murmured.

  “That’s not what I mean—” I couldn’t finish my sentence, so I found his mouth and kissed him again. Then I pulled back.

  Our faces were inches apart, and we were staring at each other, almost cross-eyed. If we took things further, this could be incredibly awkward, I thought. Or cheap and meaningless—or just plain terrible. Then one of us would have to quit support group, and if we saw each other around town, we would turn our heads and pretend to be strangers.

  “Maggie,” Charlie said softly. “If you don’t want to—”

  My worries were a Greek chorus in my head, but desire roared over them. I wanted to. I wanted to so much so that I had to pull Charlie to me and show him because I could not speak.

  Afterward, as we lay there panting, he kissed me again with the same sort of hunger he had shown before he had seen me hit a high note. Then he said, “Was that okay?”

  “Are you kidding? That was amazing,” I told him. And it had been. I could not remember when intimacy had pulled me out of my mind like that, and my body was still buzzing with residual pleasure.

  “I’m glad,” he said, wiping his brow with the t-shirt I had tossed on the counter just before we had taken to the floor like a couple of teenagers. “I thought so, too.”

  I stood up, still naked. It was chilly and I would need to get dressed soon, but the fact that I had not rushed to cover myself was yet another surprise. Adam had seen me nude at every stage of my adult life, and yet I had always preferred to be partially clothed, or to at least have the lights dimmed, when we made love. Now here I was, every one of my imperfections revealed beneath the glare of the bright kitchen lighting, and I felt fine. Charlie had only ever seen this version of me, and it was the one he had chosen; there seemed to be no need to hide any sagging or bagging.

  “Oh, Maggie,” he said, rising from the floor. “You’re really something.”

  I smiled. He was, too. And I wanted . . .

  More.

  You’re infatuated, I told myself, half chiding, half gleeful, as I tugged my clothing back on. Instead of ruining things between us, being intimate had just transformed my crush into something more potent and intoxicating.

  I wondered if this was how Adam had felt when he started flirting with Jillian. Not that I was excusing him, but there was something enlivening about the affection of someone who hadn’t known you for most of your life.

  “Hey, Maggie?” said Charlie as he pulled his t-shirt back over his head.

  “Yes?”

  “You want to go hang out on the sofa for a little bit?” he asked with an uncertain smile.

  It’s funny how a grown man can glance at you a certain way and reveal exactly what he had looked like as a child. While I had felt exposed earlier, Charlie was now the vulnerable one. I had hoped the night would end with a kiss, maybe a bit of spirited groping, and then we could enjoy an encore performance sometime soon. But I didn’t want to hurt Charlie or push him out the door, so I smiled and said I would love to hang out.

  On the sofa, I leaned back into the broad expanse of his chest as he wrapped his arms around me.

  It was only then that panic began to set in.

  In addition to the magnetic physical connection I felt with Charlie, I happened to like him an awful lot. But I was in uncharted territory with a rebound relationship. When the time came, would I know to jump ship—or would I end up wrecking myself again?

  NINETEEN

  I was on the back porch, surveying Jean’s yard, when Zoe called. Late March had mistaken itself for May, and what had been a foot of snow the day before was now a small lake littered with dead leaves and floating twigs.

  “Honey? Is everything okay?” I immediately asked.

  “Yep. I was just calling to see how you were.”

  I almost fell right off the porch. “My daughter is reaching out in the middle of her workday—to check on me? Surely something’s wrong.”

  “Ha ha, Mom. I ran out to lunch and had a second, so I thought I’d try you.” The horns bleating in the background confirmed as much. “What have you been up to?”

  “Still looking for a job.” I told her about my interview at CenterPoint and Adrian Fromm’s follow-up offer.

  “Yeah, don’t take that,” said Zoe after I had finished.

  “Really? I thought you’d be all over it. Career path, new opportunities, blah blah blah.”

  “Blah blah blah, huh?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Sure I do. And that guy you interviewed with sounds like every guy I dated in college. He’s only out for himself.”

  “You never told me about any of the guys you dated in college.”

  “Basically, picture that jerk with six different haircuts.”

  I laughed.

  “Whoa!” said Zoe, and I heard something whiz past her.

  “Sweetheart, please tell me you didn’t almost get run over.”

  “It was just a bike messenger, Mom. I’m fine. So, are you dating anyone?”

  My heart did a little skip when I thought of Charlie, who had been over again the night before. We’d had frenetic sex in the shower, then spent more than an hour talking on the sofa with our limbs intertwined. I wanted a no-strings relationship, but cuddling seemed like . . . a string, albeit a thin one. As such, I wasn’t sure what to call what it was that Charlie and I were doing. “Not necessarily. I made a friend, though.”

  “A male friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very on-trend of you to not call him your boyfriend. I mean, do or do not—there is no try, right?”

  “Zoe!” I sputtered.

  “So you are!” she said, laughing. “Good for you. A fling is probably just the thing you need right now.”

  That was exactly what I had been thinking, but it was strange to talk to my daughter about a relationship I was having with someone other than her father.

  Zoe continued. “No need to be embarrassed about it. I mean, after years of Dad neglecting you, you deserve some attention.”

  “I was not neglected,” I said sharply. “Your father worked a lot. I always knew that, and that’s not what ended our marriage.”

  “Okay. But let’s just say there’s a reason I’m not in a relationship with anyone, and that’s because, unlike some people who will remain unnamed, I know I’m married to my job.”

  I stared at a mud puddle a few feet from where I was standing. “Ouch.”

  “I’m not trying to be mean. I just think maybe now you have a chance to really be happy.”

  “I was happy.”

  “A different kind of happy.”

  A better kind of happy—I knew that’s what she meant. Zoe hung up soon after so she could order her salad and get back to the office, but I stood on the porch for a while, thinking about what she had said.

  Had Adam neglected me? I had not felt unloved, or at least I hadn’t until he had announced he was leaving. But yes, I supposed I would have liked more time with him. Quality time—as opposed to sitting in front of the TV together while Adam combed over a legal brief. He would inevitably look up in time to catch the show’s conclusion, which meant I then had to summarize the whole plot for him. He did make it home for dinner several times a week . . . but if I wa
s honest with myself, a significant number of our conversations over the past few years had revolved around whatever case he was working on. Afterward, he would escape to his home office and work until he came to bed. “I’m doing this for us, Maggie,” he would say. “Social Security will go extinct any day now, and God only knows what will happen with Medicare. I’m trying to squirrel away as much cash as I can while I’m still able.”

  As I let myself back in the house, I wondered if I should have taken the same approach with Adam: asking for more, more, more; storing up my husband’s love for the long, lean winter that I had believed would never arrive.

  “So, do you want to come to my house sometime?” asked Charlie, peering at me through an opening in the bookshelf we were standing on either side of. He had asked me on a “real date,” as he had described it: brunch, followed by a trip to the bookstore.

  “Your house?” I said through the shelves.

  “Why not? We always end up at your place. Though I have to warn you—my house is a lot messier than yours. But maybe I could attempt to clean it, and you could come over for dinner sometime?”

  “Sure. When?”

  His head disappeared. Then he snuck up behind me and whispered into my neck, “A couple days from now, maybe?”

  His breath tickled my skin, and I laughed and spun around. As I looked at him, it occurred to me that if I went to his house in a couple of days, I would have seen him three times in a single week, not including the divorce support group. “Or maybe next week?” I suggested.

  He began to frown, but he fixed his face so fast that I almost wondered if I had imagined it. “Whenever you want. I thought maybe I could show you what I used to do for a living.”

  “I’m going to warn you, if you show me a bunch of code on a computer screen, my brain might explode. I’m a bit of a Luddite.”

  “No code—promise,” he said, holding his hands up. “I was going to show you one of my sensors. Remember I told you I owned a company?”

  I nodded.

  “I made crop-monitoring sensors that help farmers make better decisions about irrigation, harvest, and whatnot, which improves their yields. The company sold a year and a half ago, but I still have one of the sensors, if you want to see it.” For someone who didn’t like talking work, he looked awfully proud of himself.

  “That sounds neat. Why did you sell?”

  He shrugged. “That’s half the fun. Create something new, see how much it’ll go for. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I created a humidity sensor for vineyard owners and debuted it three weeks after a competitor put out an identical product that now owns that market. Lost a boatload of cash on that one.”

  “Oof.”

  “It’s all part of the game.”

  “Are you working on anything new now?”

  “Sort of. I’m poking around with a soil monitor, which might work for organic farmers. But it’s in the early stages, and I’m trying not to spend all my time on it.”

  “So . . . you’re basically okay with being uncertain about what’s next for you.”

  “Pretty much.” His smile faded. “Lu hated it. Now she’s married to a doctor. Set salary, safe life.”

  I took this as a sign that I shouldn’t tell him that his whimsical approach to the world gave me hives. Of course, I myself was living on a “for now” basis—but as soon as I figured out what I was aiming for, I planned to point myself in that direction and shoot.

  Charlie pulled a book from the shelf, flipped it over to read the back, and tucked it under his arm.

  “That’s it?” I said, raising my eyebrows. “You look at one book and decide to buy it?”

  “You missed the other four I looked at on the other side of the bookshelf. But yeah, I know what I want when I see it.” He winked. “So, dinner next week, my place? Puhleasse?”

  “Just for the record, I can say no to you,” I said, bumping my hip against his. “But lucky for you, I don’t want to.”

  The next morning in the shower I thought about Charlie. It was so strange to be intimate with someone other than Adam. Not bad, but markedly different.

  It was not just a new body and new ways to communicate needs and desires, though there was certainly that. But it was that we were not hindered by the memory of the people we used to be. Charlie’s current self, physically and emotionally, was all I had ever known of him—and vice versa. You could not say, “But you used to” or “Why do you always” to someone you had just met.

  But if we continued on this path, however meandering it might be, all of that would eventually change. Soon boredom, lack of passion, and the countless other irritations that were part and parcel of familiarity would surface. Then what?

  I had just rinsed the shampoo from my hair when my phone, which I had left on the sink, rang. I let the water continue to run over me as I recalled Charlie laughing heartily after I had told him the only joke I could ever remember was about two melons who can’t elope.

  “You’re adorable,” he had said when he’d finished laughing.

  I didn’t mind adorable one bit. Irresistible was more problematic, and this happened to be the best way to describe Charlie. When I had told him that I could say no to him in the bookstore, it wasn’t entirely true; to be around him was to have my guard down. The last person who had made me feel that way was Ian, and that had turned out to be a spectacular disaster.

  And yet I had fallen in love with Adam slowly, rather than all at once, and that had ended in ruin, too. It seemed there was no way to be in a relationship without getting maimed.

  The phone rang again, and I let it go to voicemail. Only after it rang a third time did I turn off the faucet, throw a towel around myself, and flip the phone over to see who it was. I assumed it would be Rose, who now often called repeatedly when I didn’t pick up. But the lit-up screen revealed that it was Adam, and I was so aggravated to see his name on my caller ID that I actually answered.

  “How is it we’re talking more now than we did when we were separated?” I asked sharply. “Wasn’t the whole point of you finalizing the divorce to not deal with me anymore?”

  “Maggie,” said Adam. He sounded kind of froggy.

  “Unless this is about one of our children, I need to go.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Good—”

  “There’s something wrong with my heart.”

  I gripped my towel tighter around my body. “That’s for damn sure.” His last call, about Rose’s dementia, had seemed like a paltry excuse for reaching out, and I had a strong suspicion this was more of the same. He probably had high cholesterol or a heart murmur or some other minor problem that was his alone to fix. After all, he was the one who had broken the vow of “in sickness and in health.”

  He cleared his throat. “I had a heart attack.”

  My own heart nearly stopped. “What? When?”

  “Last night.”

  My irritation immediately evaporated. “Are you all right? What happened? Were you at work? At the gym?”

  “I was at an improv class.”

  In spite of—or maybe because of—my tense mental state, I actually started to laugh. Straitlaced Adam, whose hobbies included work, more work, and the occasional game of tennis with a colleague, had gone to an improv class? “Are you serious?”

  “I’m serious,” he said gruffly. “And thank God, because at first I thought it was heartburn. I threw up and wanted to go home to sleep. One of the guys there had a heart attack last year and realized what was happening. If he hadn’t . . .”

  If he hadn’t, he might be dead right now. I sat on the edge of my bed, breathing shallowly. Not so long ago, I had wished Adam dead. Only now did I realize just how terrible that wish was.

  “You’re sure it was a heart attack?” I said.

  “Positive. I’m at the cardiac unit at Northwestern. I got to the ER right away, so my heart muscle didn’t sustain any major damage. But . . .”

  I could feel my pulse thumping
in my neck. “But?”

  “I have to have double bypass surgery.”

  “Double? Oh dear God. Why?”

  “Two of my arteries are clogged. One is almost a hundred percent blocked. I have to stay at the hospital for monitoring, and I’m having surgery tomorrow at noon.”

  Guilt flooded my chest as I thought of how satisfying it had been to see Adam looking exhausted at the courthouse in January. If I’d had any idea his heart wasn’t pumping blood like it should have been, I would have felt differently. “Is Rick there with you?”

  Adam didn’t answer.

  “Adam?”

  He coughed. “Rick and Heather are in Bermuda right now for his annual conference. He’s the keynote speaker, so he can’t get home in time—I already asked. But they’re flying back in three days.”

  “And the kids? Did you call them?”

  “Yes. They’re getting on a flight tomorrow morning.”

  “Good.” Even after everything, I didn’t want Adam sitting by himself after surgery.

  “Maggie,” said Adam.

  The minute he said my name I knew what he was going to ask.

  “I can’t,” I said plainly.

  “There’s no one else.”

  “But the kids are coming in.”

  “Yes, but that’s just it.” He paused. “You know my father died during heart surgery.”

  He had, and it had been horrible. But Richard had been eighty-one years old at the time. “You’re fifty-three and in great health,” I said to Adam.

  “Except my arteries, which are apparently blocked like the Hoover Dam. It’s bad, Maggie. Really bad.”

  I forgot that I was not dressed, and when I rose from the edge of the bed, my towel fell to the floor. I stood there, cold and naked but too paralyzed to move. “Adam . . .”

  “Maggie, please,” he said. “I don’t know if I’m going to make it through surgery. To be honest, something deep within me tells me I won’t. And I want you to be here for Zoe and Jack if I die.”

  TWENTY

  One night over a pitcher of gin and tonics, Gita and I had gotten into a lengthy discussion about whether we loved our children or our spouses more. Of course, there was no reason to actually choose, but these were the sorts of conversations we liked to have. Gita had said she loved Reddy most, if only because she had loved him first and longer, and after further thought, she had added that without him, there would have been no Amy.