by Janis Thomas
“You know how long it takes, Mrs. D. We won’t be to the book for another forty-five. Then give us twenty for Harry.”
“Maybe I’ll read to him tonight.” Lena and Colin don matching expressions of puzzlement. I attempt to backpedal, but crash. “I mean, I haven’t done it for a while, I know.”
Colin clears his throat and Lena inspects her shoes. “He likes the way Lena reads, Em. You know that. The sound of her voice when she’s doing all the characters.”
“Why, thank you, gov’nah,” she says in a mock London accent. It’s good, I’ll give her that. My heart splinters a tiny bit more.
“And anyway, Em, I wanted to show you that chapter I’m working on.”
My turn for confusion. Colin never lets me read his works in progress. I glance at him and he winks, and his underlying message is perfectly clear. There is no chapter. He wants me alone in his office for far more scandalous reasons.
“Leeah!”
“Oh, well, my master calls.” She shrugs good-naturedly at Colin and offers me the barest hint of a smile before she leaves the room.
We listen to the ascent of the wheelchair lift. Once we hear the snap of the chair reaching the second floor, Colin pulls me in and kisses me hard on the mouth. I would be surprised, I should be surprised, but my body responds to him in kind. It stands to reason that my body, my physical being, is more in tune with the constantly changing tide and the perpetually shifting memories and can roll with them more easily than my mind can.
“Let’s go to my office so I can show you that chapter.”
“I should check on Katie.”
He kisses my ear. “Check on her later. This can’t wait.”
He grasps my hand and slowly lowers it to the front of his slacks, then presses it against his manhood. Shadows of Richard Green and the bathroom stall seep into my mind, and I pull my hand away.
“Come on, babe. It’s been over a week.”
“No, it hasn’t.” I shake my head. It’s been three months at least.
“One week and one day,” he says, lowering his head to my neck. He bites softly, and again, I think of Richard Green’s Altoid breath. I let the thought slip through the cracks of my consciousness. Richard Green doesn’t exist, no matter how vivid my nightmares are. I banished him with a wish. He is but a construct.
We stride through the living room and down the hallway, passing the laundry alcove. I think of last night and my fervent removal of the offending ensemble, which seemed to be an accomplice to the horrific acts exacted upon me earlier in the evening. But now I can scarcely remember peeling the clothes from my body. I threw them in the trash, I tell myself. But I didn’t. There was no reason to throw the clothing away because there was no attack because Richard Green doesn’t exist.
I call upon my newly found, moment-to-moment thinking. I can’t tether myself to any of my memories, otherwise I’m afraid my brain will blow apart.
We reach Colin’s office and he pulls the door shut behind me, then drags me to the desk. The room is small and overloaded with books and magazines and stacks of newspapers, because Colin refuses to read anything on a tablet. The shelves are piled with fragments of old, discarded manuscripts, the pages listing toward the ground from the pull of gravity coupled with the despair of abandonment.
Colin kisses me again and half pushes, half lifts me onto the edge of the desk, disregarding the papers that are now beneath my butt. And although the ghost of the man who no longer exists (who never existed) tries to intrude, he/it is unsuccessful. Because I am responding to my husband in a way I haven’t for (one week and one day) years. My arms reach up and circle his neck as I pull him closer.
Colin presses against me, the outline of his penis imprinting itself on my thigh, and I can feel the blood rushing to my loins. He yanks at my lounge pants, his hands losing traction on the slippery fabric, then firmly grasps the elastic band and shoves it to my knees. I shimmy my legs until the pants drop to my feet. I kick them away and absently watch the mound of satin slide across the floor.
Colin’s face has gone magenta. The golden flecks in his hazel eyes glow with desire. He leans away from me and tugs at the waistband of his trousers as I hurriedly remove my underwear. We finish our separate tasks simultaneously and come together. I lift my knees to grant him access as he plunges his stiff erection deep within me. I cry out and absently hope that the walls of this old house are thick enough to withstand my prurient exclamations.
It takes only a handful of thrusts for me. I come, and come, and come as I haven’t for as long as I can remember, the untrustworthiness of my memories notwithstanding. My resounding orgasm inspires Colin to drive himself deeper within me, and a moment later, he explodes—seizes, goes stiff, shudders, gasps, shrieks, then collapses against me.
We breathe in unison for a while, neither of us offering up a spoken word because words are useless in the aftermath of such powerful lovemaking.
“I really need to keep some towels or tissues handy,” he says finally, and I offer him a low chuckle.
He withdraws from me, and I feel a trickle of moisture leak out onto his desk.
“Do you think anyone heard?” I ask, because I am still me and still concerned with proper social deportment.
“Does it matter?” Colin asks. “We’re married. We have every right to copulate.”
“Copulate. How romantic.”
He laughs, and the carelessness of his laughter strikes a chord in me. I realize that he wants Lena to hear us. He wants Josh’s caregiver to know we are fucking. Because maybe, just maybe, he is envious of her attention to our son. He is attracted to this obsidian-haired minx, and in some perverse scenario, devised by his own covetousness, he thinks that she’ll be jealous if she is aware of our coupling and will seek him out with the intention of making me a cuckold.
I don’t know this to be true. But it feels true.
I gather myself together and stand. Colin pulls up his trousers.
Emma Davies, director of marketing and business acquisition and retention.
I use my discarded undies to mop away the effluvium from my vagina. My husband kisses my cheek, more obligation than inclination.
“Thanks for that,” he says.
I still throb from my climax, but my enthusiasm is gone. “You’re welcome.”
I refrain from asking to see Colin’s latest chapter.
SIXTEEN
I watch carefully, discreetly, from the living room as Colin walks Lena to her car, the three-year-old Prius parked across the street that I failed to notice upon my arrival. The clock in the hallway reads eleven o’clock. Apparently, this is her usual departure time; Colin and I still have overnight duty.
My husband and Lena exchange words, but I can only guess at them. He holds the car door open for her then dawdles as she disappears behind the wheel. The engine whispers to life, and the driver’s window descends. He leans down and says something to her, and the slightest hint of resentment percolates inside me at the sight of him conversing so gratuitously with her. Colin is infatuated, as is Josh, with this Lena.
I understand his—and Josh’s—enchantment with this woman. She is young and attractive and vigorous. And the unassailable fact is, I have brought her into our lives through whatever conjuring powers I possess, so it is ridiculous for me to resent her. Yet I do.
When moments pass, and they are still immersed in their duologue, I make a concerted effort to move away from the window. I walk down the hall, pass through the kitchen, and enter the family room. The next item on my checklist is a task only I can accomplish.
The family room, like the rest of the house, is tired. The couches are careworn, just as they were yesterday and the day before, when everything was right in its wrongness and I knew the depth and breadth of my existence. I wonder again at the state of our home, at the cracks in the ceiling and the fading paint on the walls. Why, if we can afford luxuries such as Lena, can we not support a fresh coat of paint?
I sit in front
of the computer and press the “Power” button, my thoughts hovering over my husband and my son’s caregiver who must still be deep in conversation since I haven’t heard the front door open and close.
I twist the knob of the baby monitor on the side of the desk, and the room fills with the sound of my son’s loud, rhythmic breathing. I listen for a moment and match his inhalations and exhalations with my own. Then I turn my attention to the computer screen and type in a command. A second later, my QuickBooks home budget/income and expenses file opens. All our household bills are listed here with their individual due dates. In the past, I didn’t put these bills on autopay because I was never sure if my checking account could cover them. I’m expecting the bills to be automatically paid now that I am a director of marketing, but, as before, each payment requires my permission. Strange.
I click onto my checking account, and my mouth opens in surprise at the amount displayed in the balance column. Another of my expectations—one of a flush bank account with plenty of padding—is dashed. The balance is the same as it was three days ago. Minimal.
I scroll over my account history. My salary, although more than twice what it was, is eaten away every month due to the addition of a second caregiver, the subtraction of Colin’s income, and extortionate legal fees, which I can only assume are related to Owen. I bite my lower lip. How perfect. I thought life might be easier with the newly vaporized Richard and the lofty position at my firm. But no. The struggle remains.
And I no longer get to read to my son.
I hear the front door close, and a moment later, Colin appears in the doorway.
“Bills, huh?” he says and I nod. “Good times.”
“Did you have a nice chat?” The question sounds snarkier than I meant it to be. Colin doesn’t notice.
“She’s a very interesting girl.”
“She’s not a girl, Colin,” I reply, my eyes fixed on the computer screen. “She’s, what, twenty-four, twenty-five?”
“That makes her a girl to me, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose.”
“Do you know she spent a year in São Tomé? Talk about off the map.”
“Hmm.” I don’t want to talk about Lena. I’m poring over the list of expenses, many of which are completely foreign to me, which is no surprise since I am an accidental tourist in my own life right now.
“Colin, what is this debit payment to Staples for nineteen hundred dollars?”
He moves to the desk and leans over my shoulder to peer at the screen. “Laptop, remember? My Samsung crashed.”
“Nineteen hundred dollars?” I repeat. “For a laptop?”
“It’s a MacBook Pro, Em. You know that.”
“Why do you need a MacBook Pro, Colin? It’s not like you’re doing graphics. You’re word processing. A Chromebook would have cost us five hundred bucks out the door.”
“This is so typical,” he says. “You tell me to get what I need and I do and now you’re throwing it back at me.”
“You didn’t need a MacBook,” I say quietly. “What about this? Three nights at the Red River Inn?”
He squints down at me. “Are you having a senior moment, Emma? The writers’ conference? You don’t remember me going?”
No, I don’t remember. Because yesterday you worked for the junior college and I was a lowly assistant and we never would have been able to afford three nights at the Red River Inn for either one of us.
“Right. Sorry. I forgot. The conference. Speaking of which, you said the book’s coming along well.”
“It’s a manuscript, Emma, not a book. It’s not a book until it gets published.” This is one of Colin’s favorite sayings. I’ve heard it dozens of times and still I make the same mistake.
“I’m thinking positively,” I reply. “How soon do you think you’ll finish?”
He answers with a shrug. Not a good sign.
“I imagine Lawrence is pretty anxious to get it from you.” Lawrence Gibbon is Colin’s agent, the man responsible for Colin’s book deals and possibly the only person in the world who still believes in Colin’s writing.
I glance up to find Colin giving me a sharp look. “You know I’m not with Lawrence anymore, Em. Jesus. What’s the matter with you tonight? It’s like you’re in a fog.”
“You’re not with Lawrence.”
I rack my brain to come up with the newly formed correlating memory. Nothing.
“I fired him after Hemingway tanked. Remember he wanted me to do a thing about Ferlinghetti instead of Frost? I mean, come on. Ferlinghetti?”
“Your book—manuscript is about Robert Frost?” Talk about overdone.
“You know, Emma, I’m a little bit worried about you. Maybe you should make an appointment with Lettie.”
Too late. Already did. She can’t help me.
“Colin, I know your manuscript’s about Frost, I just . . . I don’t know . . . I think we need to talk about how we’re going to bring in more money. How do you feel about going back to teaching?”
He glares at me, then looks down and shakes his head with disgust. “Well, how pleasant this evening has turned out, eh?”
I have to choose my words carefully because I am missing too many pieces in this puzzle.
“I don’t mean to upset you, Colin. It’s just that I’m a little concerned. Katie is a year from college. How are we going to pay for it? We have no savings to speak of.”
“You said it yourself—she’ll be lucky to get into the JC. We can afford that, can’t we?”
“I don’t know.”
He lifts his hand to his face and squeezes the bridge of his nose with his thumb and index finger. An acupuncturist taught him this trick a hundred years ago, before I met him. He uses the technique at those times when he would prefer to be screaming.
“Look, Emma. We decided when you got your promotion that your salary was big enough to allow me to work full-time on my manuscript. I’m sorry if my creative timeline doesn’t concur with your expectations. Three years isn’t that long to write a manuscript like this one.”
Three years. Colin has been working on his manuscript for three years. For God’s sake.
“You know what, Colin? Forget it. I’m sorry I brought it up.”
“So am I. I was feeling so good after our . . . earlier antics. But now . . .”
The familiarity of the moment charges me. In my new reality, this is a common theme with Colin and me. We argue about finances, about my resentment that he is basically a kept man, that I am bringing home the bacon while he is listening to Cole Porter between minuscule bouts of typing. If I believed in him, if I thought this rubbish about Frost was going to be a success, we wouldn’t have this repetitive skirmish. But he knows that I have no faith in his words, and I know that he knows it. We make love once or twice a week to give credence to our union, to offer proof that our connection remains intact. But the subtle undertones of our marriage have gone gray.
He waits for me to say something, but I have nothing to offer. He sighs.
“I’m going up,” he says. “Unless you need me for something.”
I shake my head.
He leans down and kisses my temple—a conciliatory gesture, a white flag, an olive branch. On the one hand, Colin recognizes that he is a leech and I am the body whose blood offers him sustenance. On the other hand, he knows that he saved me—and Kate—and therefore it is his right to expect recompense for his sacrifice.
“I’ll be up soon,” I tell him. He slinks from the room.
With Josh’s breathing as my soundtrack, I spend the next fifteen minutes signing off on bills—the mortgage, which makes me cringe every time I pay it, gas, electric, cable. We could cut back on our cable service. What the cable company charges is akin to extortion. But Josh likes all the random stations that cost extra—the nature channels that have programs dedicated to river monsters and polar bears and the sci-fi channels that show what life would be like in space, in the future, in alternate pasts, the pay stations like HBO and S
tarz with their blockbusters that Josh doesn’t see in movie theaters like everyone else. I can’t bear to take any of these channels away from him.
I check my account balance one last time before I shut down. Alarming.
Colin has turned off most of the lights downstairs, but the ambient light from the street, the glow of the digital clock on the cable box, the LED on the hood of the kitchen fan illuminate my path. I climb the stairs slowly, my footsteps heavy and listless.
When I reach the second floor, I automatically head for Josh’s room.
His night-light winds through its cycle, blue, green, red. I approach the bed and gaze down at my son. He sleeps deeply tonight, for once unimpeded by his ruined body, and I briefly wonder if Lena’s attentions inspire him to sleep thoroughly, so that he might dream of her and of a self without hindrances to which she might attach herself.
I had such dreams for this boy, this almost man. I remember him in my womb. At twenty-six weeks, in a tiny cubicle of a room, the ultrasound technician measured the length of his spine and pointed out his penis and told me that all was well. All was well. And in that small room, with the cold gel on my stomach and the Rorschach blob of a baby on the screen, I made a million plans for him, saw a million sports events with him as the head of whichever team he played on, watched him walk to the dais of his high school graduation, college graduation, down the aisle at his wedding. None of my fantasies in that tiny room included a wheelchair and a staircase lift and a boy who couldn’t pronounce consonants.
I hate the memory and how it makes me resent the person I see before me. He is my son, and I love him, but he is also a promise unfulfilled. I despise myself for thinking that, but I cannot deny the thought.
His breathing is regular. I needn’t worry. Another sound presents itself, a soft mewling, like that of a kitten. I turn toward the bathroom.
The adjoining door to Kate’s room is closed, and the sound is coming from behind it. I walk into the bathroom and press my head against her door. The mewling is louder. My daughter is crying. Not the volatile sobs of a fresh bout of tears, but the lethargic end to a lengthy round of weeping.