“Ha ha.” Still he wasn’t leaving. “Look, would it be all right if I called you sometime? I know you’re married and all, but it sounds like, well, special circumstances.” When Jane hesitated, he said, “Just to talk. This sounds corny and all, but I feel like I already know you.”
Jane found a pencil and a note pad in the console and wrote down her cell phone number. Her name too, in case it didn’t stay with him. “Here. Oh, don’t forget the cookies.”
“Cookies, right.” He gathered them up, hesitated, then turned back and kissed her again. Slower this time, more inquisitive and exploratory. Then he drew away, stepped out to the curb, and shut the car door. “See you.”
Jane watched him until he rounded the corner and disappeared. Small explosions, like static electricity, went off in her skin. She turned on the GPS and waited for the bright mechanical voice to guide her home.
the language of flowers
Eric sent her flowers. Actual flowers. He had never done this before. Nor, with a couple of exceptions, a couple meaning exactly two, had any other man she’d ever known. She had not been a flower kind of a girl.
Bonnie studied the bouquet, first from the chair she drew up next to it, then getting up and moving around the apartment, trying out different angles and distances. There were roses, lots of them, big champagne-colored blooms of a sort she had not seen before. Also some ferny stuff and smaller, trailing sprigs, white and fragrant. The flowers came in a tall vase that was sprayed gold to go along with the general magnificence of the thing.
Bonnie tried to decide what it meant, sending flowers, especially ones as extravagant-seeming as these. The card said Love, Eric and it was written out in his own handwriting. He’d gone into the shop himself rather than ordering them over the phone or online. You were meant to pay attention to such flowers. She guessed she was meant to look upon his suit with favor. Take him back into her bed. Which she had not yet decided to do.
She was at a low point and by now nothing she might do or not do seemed like a good idea. She missed him but she didn’t know if the two of them made sense anymore; in fact, she was pretty sure they did not. By now there was so much difficult history between them, their affair had become almost like another marriage. They’d had their honeymoon of sexual ecstasy, their doubts and bruised feelings and reconnections. And now they seemed to have circled back to courtship.
Or maybe she was reading things wrong? Maybe when Jane had outed and shamed them, that had been a final and insurmountable blow, and the flowers were meant as a kind of kiss-off. A sentimental (and expensive) farewell and thanks for the memories. Maybe he had decided the question for her, and all her back-and-forth, yes-or-no, should-or-shouldn’t drama was beside the point. Maybe they would never see each other again. Except perhaps in some safe and sexless territory that would never be anything other than glum and awkward, everything over over over.
She bounded up from her chair. She couldn’t stand it, she had to talk to him. It was the end of the workday, of her workday at least. There was no guarantee of reaching Eric, who often enough stayed late at the hospital. Or else he might have gone home on time for once and was already in the bosom of his family, doing penance. Maybe Jane had gotten flowers too.
Bonnie punched in his cell phone number and listened to it ring, once, twice, three times and the fourth meant voice mail.
Eric answered. “Hey there.” A distant, tin can sound to his voice.
“Are you on speaker?” She hated the speaker phone.
“Sort of. I have a rental car, it has Bluetooth. So the call goes through the car.”
“Why do you have a rental?”
“Ah, Jane was driving my car and somebody hit her in a parking lot. So it’s in the shop.”
“Oh, sure.” It was not how she had planned to begin. She tried to regain her momentum. “The flowers are beautiful, thank you.”
“You like them? I thought they were pretty.”
“They’re this wonderful color.” It occurred to her that they were the color of fancy lingerie. She hurried past this thought. “Kind of a peachy, pale gold. Very elegant.”
“Good, that’s good. I wanted to . . .” His voice cut out, then back in. “. . . for you.”
“I can’t hear you.”
“I said, I thought they’d brighten your day.”
That was not what he’d said, but there was no getting it back now. “Where are you anyway?”
“. . . home.”
“Why don’t you call me sometime when you’re not driving, OK?”
“Wait, I’ll pull over. Hold on.” There was some scattered, ambient noise as he put the phone down and maneuvered the car. Bonnie waited. One of the things you could really get tired of was never being able to have an uninterrupted phone conversation. Either Eric was trying to juggle the phone while he drove or else he was getting calls from home or his pager was going off. “All right, sorry.” At least he’d turned the Bluetooth off. “What were you saying?”
“Nothing. Just, thanks. Have a good evening.”
“No, wait, I do want to talk to you. How’ve you been?”
“Fine,” Bonnie said, still feeling difficult and pissy, roses or no. “I bet you’re fine too.”
“They gave me a pretty cool rental. A BMW.”
“Uh huh.”
“Want to see it? It’s sharp.”
“How am I supposed to do that, exactly?”
“Look out your front window.”
“What?” Bonnie took the phone away from her ear and stared at it. Put it up to her ear again. “What are you talking about?”
“Just go look.”
Bonnie went to the window and pulled back the curtain. A car at the curb flashed its lights.
“What are you doing here?”
“I miss you. I wanted to see you.”
“No, what are you doing here right now? Did you think the roses would soften me up?”
“You called me,” Eric reminded her.
“Were you out there waiting to see if I’d call? Huh?”
“I was hoping you’d call,” he admitted.
“Ha,” Bonnie said. She had him dead to rights. “Sorry, that’s a little too cute for me. When I was a kid, Charlie and I used to set rabbit traps. We’d get a cardboard box and prop it up with a stick and put a carrot on the ground. So the rabbit would go for the carrot and knock the stick and the box would fall and trap it. Needless to say, it never worked. You didn’t use a carrot, you used roses. Nice try.” She felt idiotic looking out the window at him and dropped the curtain.
Eric cleared his throat. “I drive by here a lot. On my way home from work.”
She was incredulous. “You’ve been stalking me?”
“That’s such a melodramatic word,” he said, sounding annoyed. “It presumes all these hateful motives. Was Romeo stalking Juliet when he showed up under her balcony?”
“Now you’re Romeo.”
“I don’t know what I am.” He coughed and tried to suppress it. “Sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” For coughing, maybe.
“For being stupid and miserable and missing you.”
There was a space of silence. Then Bonnie said, “I’m not going to let you inside.”
“Yeah, OK.” He sounded droopy and hopeless, in a way she found irritating.
“But I’ll come out and talk to you. Give me a minute.”
She ended the call, went to the bouquet, and extracted one of the roses. She rummaged around in a bathroom drawer for bobby pins. Of course there were none. Victorian ladies probably had all sorts of hair pins and miniature vases for such purposes. In the end she settled for braiding the stem into her hair and securing it with a paper clip. She didn’t bother to change out of her sweatshirt and jeans. She thought she looked badass.
She locked the apartment doo
r behind her and stepped out into the early dusk. The passenger side of the BMW was at the curb, and Eric reached over to open the door for her. Bonnie got in and shut it behind her. “Nice ride,” she said. “I’m all sorts of impressed. Take me, I’m yours.”
He touched the flower in her hair with one finger. “Pretty.”
There was enough of the last daylight for her to get in a sideways look at him. “You look tired,” she said, although she had not intended to say anything. In fact he looked worse than tired, he looked worn down. Old, even.
“I’m always tired.” Not a complaint, just a statement of fact.
“You do have the original high-stress job.”
“I’m used to that by now.”
“You don’t sound convinced,” Bonnie said, who was happy to keep the conversation away from herself. “More like a punch-drunk fighter.”
“I’m used to being tired,” he corrected. “But I’m not tired of the work. Not most days. Most days you feel like you’re doing something almost nobody else can do. And it’s important, it’s needed. Although there are times I wish everybody could just be . . . healthy. Let the body do its work without all these violent interventions.”
Bonnie looked at him, wondering. Eric was famous for his annoyingly positive attitude about his profession. It was practically an article of faith that he loved medicine and everything to do with it. If he was getting a case of burnout now, that was something new. Or maybe admitting to it was something new.
“But listen to me go on,” Eric said, as if he was aware of a lapse. “Tell me how you are. I really was sorry to hear about your mother. I’m glad I got to meet her, I liked her.”
“Thanks. I’m fine. There’s always family stuff to get through, but everybody’s coping.” Haley and the kids were staying in Wisconsin, which suited Haley since she wouldn’t have to go back to her marriage, and suited Stan since someone would be there to run the house and be an audience for his tantrums. The kids could go to a normal school and learn swear words and how to play video games. Charlie was supposed to be doing another stint in rehab, though no one was too hopeful by this time.
“Death of a parent,” she said. “It’s one of those milestones everybody gets to experience.” She didn’t want to talk about meeting Carl Rizzi. It was a sore place in her heart that she didn’t like touching. “This really is a sharp car,” she said, wanting to move the conversation along.
“I had to put down some of my own cash for it but I thought, why not. A little self-indulgence.”
Another thing that was not really in character for him. He seldom spent money on himself. Bonnie found this new, restless version of Eric interesting; severely, she damped her attraction down. She listened to him recount the car’s many luxury features. The 50/50 weight distribution. Zero to sixty in some ridiculous time measured in seconds. Heated seats, blind spot detection. Speed limit information. Automatic door closers. She’d heard it said that men regarded cars as substitutes for women. Or had it been the other way around? Regardless, she would be at a disadvantage. She was not very well equipped with top of the line options.
“I’m thinking, even when I get the Toyota back, I could lease this.” He shrugged, looking glum, which she knew translated into embarrassment, probably at his own excitement over a fancy car. He would regard it as one of those guy things he was supposed to be immune to.
“You should do that, if you want. Go for it.” She almost said, “Live a little,” but she did not want to sound too encouraging.
“We could see each other,” Eric said, as if this was the conversation they’d been having all along. “There’s no obstacle now with Jane. She doesn’t care what I do.”
“Oh yes she does. And she cares that I’m the one you were doing it with. Don’t be mistaken about that.”
“She’s done with me.”
“Well you’re not done being married, are you? Or living under the same roof, or raising children together. It’s a screwed up situation. I can’t do that kind of thing anymore.”
“Since when did you—” He stopped himself. “Sorry.”
“Since when did I get so scrupulous? Fuck you. Like, sincerely.”
“All right,” he said, meaning, he gave up. Which made her, perversely, more angry with him. How dare he send his giant extravagant roses, cruise her neighborhood in his ridiculous extravagant car, if he was only going to weakly concede?
“Let me try and explain it to you. Why I can’t go back to what it was.” She still didn’t want to talk about Carl Rizzi, but maybe she could talk around him. “You want to hear it or not?”
“Of course I want to hear it.”
Now she wished she hadn’t said anything. But she guessed she owed him this much of an explanation, after all those damned roses. “I’m a slow learner,” she began. “I always thought I was pretty crazy-adventurous, you know, a thrill seeker. That’s who I was. Prided myself on it, actually. Venturing where others dared not.”
She paused, waiting for Eric to say something, but he wasn’t about to interrupt. Nowhere to go but onward. “So you do all these outlandish things, you carry on with all these bad idea men, no, let me finish, and you get this romantic notion of yourself as, I don’t know, passion’s plaything? Shipwrecked on the wilder shores of love? I don’t even want to think about the crap I used to tell myself. Then one day, the short answer is, I figure some things out. I was raised with all these addicted people and I grew up addicted to chaos and drama and I guess, acting out to get attention.” She stopped, feeling depleted, even a little nauseated. “So that’s the deal. It’s all sickness. And I have to try and get better. Bonnie 2.0.”
It was entirely dark by now, the cool light of the many dashboard gizmos the only illumination.
Bonnie looked out to her own apartment windows, her hand already on the door, ready to take her leave. Then Eric said, “I don’t think I’m a bad idea.”
“Oh?” Disbelieving. “Come on, you’re the ultimate bad idea. You’re like, original sin.”
“Maybe at the beginning. Not now. Now we’re the best thing each other has. Or you are for me.”
He waited, but now it was Bonnie’s turn to keep silent. He went on. “You think you’re the only one second-guessing yourself? Exhausted with yourself? OK, we shouldn’t have. But we did. And where we are now, it could be pretty great. I wish it wasn’t sideways and upside down and backwards. In spite of all that, here I am. Up to you.”
He was done with talking. Bonnie reached out and took his hand. “I think I’m going to need some more flowers.”
Why take him back? Why start up all over again, in spite of all the good intentions and sadder-but-wiser speeches, everything that was complicated and hurtful? Because she held out hope that Eric was right, and that they were a good thing, not a wicked, or a furtive, or a crazy-making thing. Their own version of a marriage, messy with compromise and complications, but like any other marriage. She was lonely, she loved him, he felt the same. Start with that.
They returned to each other with all the old feeling. But something had changed. Their lovemaking was steady, comfortable and comforting, but no longer filled with desperate erotic violence, as before. No longer provoking and submitting, no more the particular sexual delirium that they had previously inhabited. They did not speak of it. Bonnie thought it was likely that neither of them wanted to embarrass or blame the other. And she did not blame him. It was just how things progressed, for them and for everybody else who lived long enough.
They still had their share of reliable pleasure. Were still at ease with each other’s bodies. One could hardly complain. It might even be a cause for a certain kind of celebration, since this new and calmer state was surely a part of what she had claimed she wanted: a life not built around ridiculous extremes of feeling or behavior. Anyway, there was still enough of the unconventional and the outlandish in their situation, wasn’
t there? How much, exactly, of tameness and sameness did she have to complain about?
But there was a way in which the diminishment of sex was the exaltation of death. Bonnie did not put it to herself in quite these words, but she felt its truth. You gave up dancing one jig and took up another. The body failed. Flowers wilted and so did you. If anything, she loved him more dearly now, and more sadly, because of what had been lost, what was broken, and now what remained.
What to do. Push the dread and doubt to one side and enjoy what they could of their shadow marriage. The time they managed to spend together, squeezed in between and around other obligations. Their cautious plans for how they might, in time, come to spend an entire night together, go on trips together. The matter-of-factness of checking in and checking out, the foreseeable exasperations. All this might have gone on for quite some time if Jane had not up and fallen in love.
jane writes a poem
Jane and Patrick walked along North Avenue Beach. The beach had been closed to swimming for a month, since Labor Day. The long, boat-shaped beach house was closed as well, and the vendors of Sno Cones and Pronto Pups, of wakeboards and paddleboards and kayaks and Jet Skis, sandals and sunglasses and T-shirts had all gone away, the summer long over. But the sky today was blue, as was the rolling lake, and any number of people were walking along the paved paths or on the sand itself. Bicyclists and runners streamed past them, keeping up their single-minded pace.
It was always cooler near the lake and the breeze off the water was strong and chill. Patrick had taken off his leather jacket and given it to Jane to wear. She hugged it to her. It gave her the most extreme and solemn pleasure that he had done so. There was the jacket itself, with its good smell and its silky lining and the zone of warmth within it. A man giving you his jacket was the kind of thing you might see in a movie, all right a not very good movie, but still.
“You been here before?” Patrick asked her, and Jane said she didn’t think so. She might have driven past it, or been driven past it, or perhaps that had been some other beach. She couldn’t remember. She’d been raised instead around suburban pools and compulsory swimming lessons.
She Poured Out Her Heart Page 36