Odds : A Love Story (9781101554357)

by O'Nan, Stewart

  In the bathroom, cleaning herself, she knew it had been a mistake, undertaken casually, without thought of the consequences, as if this were any other weekend. She had to be more careful. Making love was a way of laying claim to each other, both of them openly agreeing to renew that bond. After all of their problems, she wanted foremost to be honest—her fear was that after the fact he might accuse her of premeditation—but their habits were so entrenched, and she didn’t want to hurt him. She figured it would hold him till tomorrow at least.

  “How’s your stomach?” he asked when she returned.

  “It’s okay. Where’s the clicker?”

  “By the TV.”

  She grabbed it and he lifted the covers to let her back in.

  Since neither of them was working, they’d developed the bad habit of sleeping late and watching TV in bed, checking the news and weather, then surfing her cooking and home makeover shows. Here she didn’t feel guilty about it, and indulged herself, seeing what the Barefoot Contessa was making.

  “I wonder how late the buffet serves brunch,” he said.

  “You’re not serving me breakfast in bed?”

  “We could.”

  “I’m just kidding.”

  He went to the bathroom, then paraded in front of her to open the drapes, letting in the blinding light. He stood there like a hairy cherub, admiring the view.

  “People are already out there taking pictures. Hey, they’ve got horse-and-buggy rides.”

  All she wanted to do was watch her show, but no, he needed her attention. He was such a boy.

  “Why don’t you go take your shower?” she said.

  “Want me to holler for you?”

  “No, I want to see how this turns out.”

  Once he was gone, the bare stage of the room made her excuse all the more glaring. He was playful after they made love, frisky, yet she felt no residual giddiness, no surge of energy, only fatigue and a vague bitterness. She wasn’t angry with herself so much as at her expectations—that once again she’d fooled herself into doing something she knew wouldn’t help in the long run. She’d felt the same way with Karen at the end, but then she’d attributed it to guilt and the stalemate of their situation. Now there was no one she was trying to be faithful to but herself, and she couldn’t even do that.

  In the bathroom he was singing. She muted the TV to hear.

  “Try to understand,” he crooned. “Try to understand. Try try try to understand. He’s a ma‑gic man.”

  They were seeing Heart tonight, a band he mistakenly thought she’d liked when she was a teenager, because he’d liked them as a teenager. As he did the solos, ridiculously impersonating the various instruments, she lay there listening, clicker in her lap, not understanding how he could be that oblivious, and that happy, both of which, she thought, were at least partly her fault.

  Odds of surviving going over the Falls in a barrel:

  1 in 3

  He met Wendy through the United Way. The two of them were volunteer chairs of their respective insurance companies’ charitable giving, and the second Wednesday of each month drove into United Way headquarters in Cleveland for a board meeting. Before he knew her at all, he remembered her name that way: Wendy, Wednesday. He would have said she wasn’t his type—dark and petite, cool in her navy suits, richly lipsticked, her hair pulled back severely. She was also married, a full carat stone prominent on her finger, though he would have equally had no business with her if she were single. She was younger than he was, in her late twenties, with an MBA from Wheaton. She carried a calculator in her briefcase and made a show of consulting it during meetings, as if someone had nominated her treasurer. The first time he talked to her directly was to contradict her assertion that Children’s Hospital received enough money from public tax dollars, a claim she defended privately via e‑mail the next day with a breakdown of their expenses. He retaliated that afternoon with the latest numbers from their largest suburban hospital, earning him an immediate response: Apples and oranges.

  If oranges cost more, he replied, why would we want fewer apples?

  They chatted before the next meeting. She called him Arthur, a name he’d never liked until he heard her say it. Her hands were tiny, almost childlike, holding her coffee. A delicate silver cross rode the pulse in the hollow of her throat. She had a way of smiling wider when she disagreed with a point he was making, effectively scrambling whatever argument he was formulating. He suspected she knew her effect on him, laughing as they went over their fellow board members’ pet projects. Hers was the Visiting Nurses’ Association, because, she admitted, her mother was a visiting nurse.

  “Still is,” she said, nodding with pride. “So why are you Children’s white knight?”

  “I used to work there when I was young and idealistic.”

  “And now you work for the bad guys.”

  “They’re not the bad guys.”

  “We,” she said. “We’re not the bad guys.”

  “Right. We’re not the bad guys.”

  She laughed, rocking her head back to expose her neck. “Oh my God, you’re still an idealist. How do you do it? And keep your job, I mean.”

  “I’m not, really.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said.

  He wasn’t used to women flirting with him, married or otherwise, and convinced himself he was mistaken, but then, during the meeting, when the guy from Sohio started in with his Free Trees program, she turned to him and rolled her eyes.

  They e‑mailed inconsistently. He looked forward to seeing her, picturing what outfit she’d wear (the gray pinstripe was a favorite), and became accustomed, once a month, to driving the last few miles of 90 into the city sporting an insuppressible erection. When she missed a meeting because she was on vacation, he couldn’t help but note how dull it was.

  You missed me, she divined. That’s so sweet.

  After writing and deleting it twice, he replied: I did.

  Because it was true, and they were both married, and it was just work—volunteer work!—nothing he took home with him. He was flattered and happy to have her as a friend, though even then that was a lie, because he’d begun to think of asking her to lunch, which was personal, and out of his way, since her office was in Lakewood, and he would never ask her to drive into the city. She would know, anyway, that he was proposing more than lunch. He was afraid of what she’d think of him because he’d already thought it himself. She was right, he was an idealist, he had no defense against his desires, only the conviction that, being sympathetic, they belonged together. He had no plan, no goal other than declaring his love for her and hoping she wouldn’t laugh at him.

  Fortunately she was more experienced than he was. When he finally mustered the courage to casually suggest, after one meeting, that they should have lunch sometime, she smiled widely and said, “I think you need to think about that, Arthur.”

  Driving home, he thought she could have just said no.

  I’ve thought about it, he wrote the next day.

  Good, she replied.

  I think it’s apples and oranges.

  It’s not, she wrote. And that’s not what I asked you to think about.

  She proposed that for a week they not talk to each other, to seriously figure out what they were doing. Because he cared for her, he tried. He ate without tasting his food, sighed in his car on the way to work. At home he was scattered, unable to follow the dumbest sitcoms. It seemed everyone in the world was making jokes.

  Marion asked if he was all right. He was so quiet.

  He was just tired, it had been a long day, he had a headache—the same vague excuses she’d used on him for years. He was surprised and disappointed at how easily she accepted them. He thought he must be obvious, since the feeling never left him, and then wondered how well she really knew him. He hadn’t had to say a word to Wendy and she understood perfectly.

  Alone, with no one to discuss it with, he was prey to his imagination. He weighed calling her office, but w
orried that he might frighten her. His great fear was that he would go in next month and she wouldn’t be there. Finally, on the fifth day, he wrote her a carefully worded e‑mail, apologizing, saying he’d resign from the board if she was uncomfortable working with him.

  Who would that help? she immediately replied.

  I need to see you, he wrote.

  They chose an Italian place downtown and then didn’t go in. It was February, the ice on the lake just breaking up. They held hands in her car as she drove to the overlook. The beach was deserted, gulls on the shuttered pavilion puffed against the wind. That was twenty years ago, and he still remembered the way she turned and looked at him before they kissed—despairing, beseeching. She’d warned him beforehand that she had a history. She needed him to be kind. He promised he would be, not seeing, in his newfound happiness, how he could ever betray her.

  Odds of a couple taking a second honeymoon

  to the same destination:

  1 in 9

  They ate the buffet with several hundred other guests, half of them elderly Chinese men, it seemed to Marion, all of them grim and silent, waiting in line and then processing with their trays past chafing dishes heaped with greasy, lukewarm breakfast food. The flip side of last night’s restaurant, this was where the losers came to refuel. The place was set up like a giant food court, formica tables smeared with ketchup, sprinkled with salt. Art went back, fighting against the tide for a handful of napkins to swab theirs.

  His plate was brimming, French toast, sausage and bacon swimming in maple syrup. All she could handle was black coffee and a plain bagel. The view, as usual, was the Falls, sharp as a postcard. The sky was cloudless, and the sun bleached the spume bright as the snow, a blinding white curtain, half a rainbow arcing from the misty tip of Goat Island down to the cold blue roil of the gorge. On the American side, dark dots swarmed the railings. She was surprised by the number of people—most of them lovers, she supposed, here to celebrate themselves.

  “How is it?” he asked, pointing his fork at her coffee. She hadn’t touched her bagel, and wouldn’t. She already regretted the waste.

  “Awful. How’s yours?”

  “Remind me to order breakfast tonight.”

  He’d brought a stack of brochures from the lobby and shuffled through them between bites. She was fine with the horse-and-buggy ride, but the helicopter was out.

  “We have to go to Ripley’s.”

  “Do we have to?”

  “Yes.” He put it aside. “And definitely Madame Tussaud’s.”

  “Didn’t we see that last time?”

  “It was good, as I remember.”

  “You remember that?”

  “You don’t? I’m sure it’s all changed by now anyway. The House of Frankenstein?”

  “Pass.”

  “Rock Legends Wax Museum?”

  “I thought that was tonight.”

  “Well played. Ride Over the Falls? Mystery Maze?”

  His enthusiasm wearied her, but after the twin disasters of last night and this morning, she was determined, out of fairness—if these truly were their last hours together—to be good company. At the end, she and Karen barely spoke, each of them disappointed with the other, and in Marion’s case, herself. This was different. Art was reasonable to a fault, and she, as Celia liked to remind her, was too accommodating. Of all the couples they knew, she thought they had the best chance of making an amicable separation. Between the two of them they’d find a way to explain it to the children. They’d sit down and calmly lay out their plan as the best for everyone, just as they’d have to explain the bankruptcy and its residual effects. She expected tears from Emma, while Jeremy would be silently angry, as if they’d lied to him all these years instead of each other. It wouldn’t be easy by any means, but other people had done it. Holidays would be awkward, with the house gone—but there, she was being silly, it was already gone, their rooms with their childhoods gathering dust, their books and toys and skates and games. They would give the children the pick of the furniture, except they were both living in apartments. It made no sense to pay for storage for things no one wanted. Art had gone over this with her months ago; only now did its full meaning sink in. She resisted it. She’d make room in her new place, even if it meant sleeping in Emma’s old bed, though that might be strange when she had overnight guests—Art, for starters, since that had been the plan.

  She shook her head to banish the image and took another sip of watery coffee.

  “What?” Art asked.

  “Nothing you want to hear.”

  “Try me.”

  “Trust me,” she said. “You don’t.”

  “I trust you.”

  That he could be so earnest—still—spurred her.

  “I was trying to imagine what’s going to happen to us.”

  “Good things.”

  “I was thinking I might take Emma’s bed if she doesn’t want it.”

  “It’s not very big.” Meaning he disagreed.

  “I’m not going to have a lot of room.”

  “You’ll have more than I will. I could take it.”

  “That makes no sense. You’re too tall for it. The only bed that fits you is our bed.” Which was what he wanted her to take, charging her with being the keeper of their marriage bed. She’d had the job far too long already.

  “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. If we come to it.”

  “I think we’ve come to it.” She gestured to the room at large.

  He had no answer for her.

  “I told you you didn’t want to hear it.”

  “No, it’s fine. I mean, we have to be prepared.”

  “Like the Boy Scouts,” she said, saving him.

  “That’s us.” He did the salute.

  He pushed his tray aside and laid out the brochures in a line facing her, like tarot cards. “Okay,” he said, as if the question was settled. “Not everything is open, so this is what we’re looking at. I was thinking we’d do the horse-and-buggy ride first, then Journey Behind the Falls, since they’re in the same place, then lunch in the Skylon Tower for the big view, then go over to Clifton Hill for the cheesy stuff. That way if we’re running late we can cut that short. It’s all open tomorrow.”

  “I was worried.”

  “I don’t know if you’re interested in the Bird Conservatory. It’s like an indoor rain forest you walk through. I thought it looked interesting.”

  “Sure,” she said with chipper conviction, to show she was game. Why did it feel like a lie?

  First he had to go to the casino across the street to exchange some money, which led to the vision of him standing in the corner by the safe, stuffing the pockets of his barn coat with packets of bills like a bank robber. She waited for him in the sitting room, checking her Facebook, boasting to old high school friends that she was going to see Heart tonight. Emma had posted pictures of her and Mark from their trip to Winter Carnival in Montreal—Emma skating, Mark eating a cone of maple snow, the two of them kissing in the ice hotel. At Christmas Emma had been coy about their plans for the spring, when both of their leases were up. Marion had asked if getting a place together wouldn’t make sense, given their rents, and thought Emma had been close to telling her they were. They looked happy, and rather than feel envious, Marion thought it was right. It was their time. She’d had hers.

  She clicked through the pictures, occasionally glancing at the view, not minding the time alone, though after half an hour she wondered what was taking him so long. The thought that he’d been robbed was absurd, the way it made her feel sorry for him, as if he were a victim, and she squashed it. He was probably just running another errand crucial to his scheme. Despite his protestations of openness, she knew he didn’t tell her everything, just as she knew they wouldn’t have been there for a romantic weekend if not for the casino. As living, breathing proof, here she sat with the roses and unopened champagne while he was off somewhere chasing money.

  “Sorry,” he said w
hen he came back in. The hotel next door was owned by the same resort, so he had to go to a currency exchange where the rate was so bad that he decided to find an actual bank, and then he figured while he was at it he might as well turn the money into chips, which he showed her, dipping into his pocket and opening his hand.

  In his palm sat five orange chips, a purple and a black.

  “How much is that?” she asked.

  “Six thousand American.”

  “You’re like Jack with his magic beans.”

  “Let’s hope so,” he said.

  He put them in the safe, apologizing again. They’d only have to do it once more, tomorrow night, right before they played.

  “I’m going to need you to do that,” he said, as if she might refuse.

  “I can’t imagine it’s that hard. You just walk up and ask for some chips.”

  “They’ll make you sign for it, but it’s completely legal.”

  “Unlike what you just did.”

  “That’s right, I’m an international criminal.”

  “With a handful of magic beans.”

  “I also have to pee.”

  “I should too, before we go. How cold is it?”

  “It’s not bad,” he said. “Maybe twenty?”

  He’d thought they could take the scenic incline down to Table Rock, as they had on their honeymoon, but it was closed for the winter, and they had to retrace their steps and wait for a shuttle bus, which was so packed they gave their seats to an old Japanese couple. The driver had the heat blasting, and with nothing in her stomach, she felt clammy and feverish. It didn’t help that someone smelled like a cigar. She held on to the pole, bracing her legs every time they braked.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Well,” she said, “I like this bus better than the last one.”

  Outside, in the parking lot at the bottom of the incline, the cold spray revived her, needling her cheeks, and the Falls’ monolithic roar, all around them now. As they crossed the strip of park, the noise mounted. “You can really feel it,” Art said, patting his heart, and took her gloved hand in his. A clear skin of ice encased the tree branches and gas lamps and railings, the snow glazed to a shine. Only a crunchy scattering of salt kept the walkways clear.