He wandered over to the easy chair with his cup of Folgers, thinking only to watch CNN or ESPN before he headed out, but when he pressed the remote—Jesus! It was on some pay-per-view porn station. How could that be? Had Dennie been down here late at night, trying to hack past the parental controls? He pressed the button that pulled up the program guide. When had they ordered Cinemax? Shit, they were going to have to talk to Dennie about this, and when he said “they”—well, in this case, he really meant they. This was one problem that couldn’t be left to Mona. She and Dennie would both be mortified. He walked over to the phone to call her on her cell, ask what she knew about their eleven-year-old son’s dawning interest in pornography. Gosh, he hoped it was Dennie and not Diane.
It was only then that he noticed that the photo that usually hung above the phone, a portrait taken for a Christmas card three years ago, was gone. Aw, Diane had been complaining about it, said she looked like an obese chipmunk. She was going through a phase. Come to notice—that crazy kid had removed all the photos throughout the den and from the side of the fridge. Not just the photos, but the magnets, too. He glanced at the mud room. Had Mona had another spring cleaning fit? They didn’t need much heavy gear here, not often, but there were still enough nippy days in February and March that you wouldn’t want to put all the cold-weather coats away in January. Yet they were gone, too. The coats, the shoes, the tennis rackets, Dennie’s skateboard . . . Bob felt dizzy. He ran upstairs. Mona’s closet was empty, or almost, with just a few of his older suits hanging there, things that no longer fit him. Her sink, her side of the bathroom, had also been cleaned out, only a dusty box of Q-tips stashed in the vanity, along with what looked like a very old bottle of Pepto-Bismol. Had she been sneaking things out of the house bit by bit, plotting this move? Why had she left? Things had seemed fine last night, and by “fine,” he meant the same as they always were. They had brisket. He told her about Paul, and Mona said the right things, more or less. He knew that men could be a little obtuse, but there was no way she had signaled any discontent, much less unhappiness so profound that she would leave him.
And take the kids. Had she taken the kids? Or just dropped them off at school and continued on her way to wherever? She couldn’t take the kids—he would fight her over that, if only for the principle. He ran to Diane’s room first. Like the refrigerator, it had been stripped of every personal item; it was just a twin bed and a desk, and much less pink than Bob recalled. All that color, all that girlishness, had been in the details, he guessed. As for Dennie’s room—he threw open the door. It was an office. His office, Bob’s office, by all appearances, with a computer, a small CD player, a plasma screen, and a shelf of books, histories and thrillers. There was a can of soda and it wasn’t on a coaster. That’s when Bob knew that Mona had never been in this room.
And that was when he began to wonder if Mona had ever been.
Oh, but he was having a bad dream. He instructed himself to wake up, extricate himself. Nothing happened. He tried to think of something that would make it clear that this was not real life. Not pinching—that seemed silly—but something that couldn’t be done in a dream. He sipped from the flat soda in the coasterless can, picked up the phone and dialed Mona’s cell.
“The number you have reached is not a working number . . .”
She could have turned it off, no? Heck, he would turn it off, if she hadn’t, cancel the contract and screw the cost. He wasn’t going to pay for her cell, he wasn’t going to pay for anything if she left him. Was this a marital-property state? She was probably entitled to half the house’s value no matter what, and they had bought the house ten years ago so there was quite a bit of equity built up, even with house prices falling back. The house. He would look up the mortgage, the deed, whatever. You couldn’t do that in a dream, not his dreams at any rate. Whenever he had to read in dreams, the text was always gibberish, like the dummy type they used when developing manuals. There was a filing cabinet here and he opened it, reassured by the neatness of the folders, his own handwriting. No dream could produce so much paperwork, so much recognizable and comprehensive verbiage. He pulled out the folder marked “House” and located the mortgage.
It was in his name only.
Okay, that made sense, he was the one who had taken out the loan. It was on the deed, the facsimile copy that you held until you paid the house off, where Mona’s name would appear. In fact, she had been worried about that. She had seen some show with that financial lady, the one who was always yelling at women about how they handled their money, and Mona had started fretting about life insurance and whether her name was on the deed and he had taken it out and proved to her that she was covered. He found this now.
And it was in his name only.
He looked through the other files. No birth certificates for Dennie and Diane. His passport and a photocopy, but no one else’s. His insurance form claimed he carried individual coverage, not family. He wished. That would be a huge savings. All the documents agreed: he was a single forty-three-year-old. Dazed, overwhelmed, he glanced at the clock. Time to go to work. Whatever was going on, he had to be at work.
He walked out to the garage and saw, instead of his white Jeep Cherokee, a silver Audi R8, the very car that Mona had said he couldn’t have, as if she were the boss of the money, as if she contributed a single dime. The Audi cost over a hundred thousand dollars, but shouldn’t Bob have some fun in this life? Mona had made it pretty clear that he shouldn’t.
He got in, and it felt right, as if he had driven it many times. There were eighteen thousand-plus miles on the odometer, about what he would have put on a car in nine months, given the long commute to work. And there was a woman’s lipstick in the well between the bucket seats, a bright, fiery shade that Mona would never wear. Okay, even in the midst of this strange, stomach-churning, disorienting panic, Bob had to admit: things were getting interesting.
The first thing that Bob noticed at the office was the box on Paul’s desk, and a few other boxes stacked nearby, then Elena and Jack’s contemptuous looks. So yesterday had definitely happened. But what about the last twenty years? He had married Mona a year after he graduated from college. She had worked, at first. In a fashion. But it had quickly become clear that he would have to be a capital-B breadwinner, that it made no sense for Mona to work if she was going to make less money than child care cost. He had more than fulfilled his share of the bargain, and then some. He wasn’t even a bad dad, as these things go. He did some of the driving on the weekend, seldom missed a game or a performance. Okay, he almost never drove and he missed most of the events, but he was there for the really important games and performances. He never expressed any resentment at being the family’s sole provider, and that was some big pressure. He certainly had not wished that his family would disappear. Well, not exactly. He had felt wistful when he watched the single people on his staff go out after work. He had wondered, from time to time, if he would be invited should he be more available. He suspected not, but preferred not to have this fear confirmed. Besides, he was the boss, and it was better not to be too familiar. It was hard enough, making the tough decisions, only to have employees like Elena and Jack glare at him.
And when a certain kind of woman walked by—yes, yes, he thought about the roads not taken. Who didn’t? Screw Jimmy Carter, that didn’t count as cheating. Nor did the kind of cheating that Bob had done, sporadically, at conventions here or there. Everyone knew that convention sex was not really cheating. It was more like—networking with benefits.
He unlocked his office. The books were the same, although there was now a volume of Yeats between Stevens and Pound. All the plaques and trophies were gone, and the only photograph on the credenza was a picture of two men in tuxedos, vaguely familiar, although Bob couldn’t quite place them. Distant cousins at a wedding? The company’s founders? The picture had an old quality, as if it were from decades ago. Yet, his family had existed, he was sure of it. He had memories of them. There was the time that
Mona had—well, what had she done, exactly? The night of the twins’ birth—when was their birthday? How old were they? What color was their hair?
He began to panic, even as his memories receded further, faster. It was like the time when, bleary from work, he had stopped at an ATM machine and punched his number in wrong. Suddenly, he couldn’t remember his code for the life of him, and, after a few failed efforts, he pushed the Cancel button rather than risk the machine holding his card. Bob’s father had slipped into dementia before his death a few years ago, but he had been almost seventy, for God’s sake. Bob was forty-three. The ATM number had come back to him, once he’d stopped trying so hard.
He called his mother, dialing from memory. See? He wasn’t crazy, he existed. He had a mother and he knew where to find her. She lived in a retirement community back east, physically closer to her three other children, but Bob had always been her favorite. She was a doting grandmother, too. She would ask after her grandchildren and, Bob was convinced, thereby bring them back to him. The photos would appear on his credenza; the two strange men in tuxedos—waiters, conductors?—would disappear.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Bob!” She was always delighted to hear him call, but today there was an element of surprise as well.
“What’s up?”
“Nothing. Nothing new, at least since we spoke Sunday.”
He did not remember speaking to her on Sunday.
“Well, I’d just thought I’d check in.”
“So you feel better?” his mother asked.
“Um, sure.”
“I do think it’s for the best. Not that I didn’t like her—”
“Didn’t like her?” So his mother knew? Yet, she had always doted on Mona.
“Oh, Bob, I didn’t have the heart to tell you, when she visited us at Christmas, but I don’t think she was very . . . sincere.”
“Mona?”
“Mona? Who’s Mona? I’m talking about Amy, the one you just broke up with.”
Even as his mind tried to figure out who Amy was, he had a sudden image. More of an impression, really. Long legs, dark hair, a big, vivid mouth, sort of everything Mona was not, not that he could really see Mona in his mind’s eye. She was fading away, more ghostly by the moment. Short? Freckled? Blond? Blue-eyed? One of the above, none of the above? Definitely not dark, not long-legged, not the kind of woman who—wow, where had that memory come from? He blushed, thinking about what Amy had done to him in the powder room at his mother’s house outside Wilmington, Delaware, his siblings and their spouses and all the little nieces and nephews just a few feet away, in the living room, Bob gasping in shock, then biting down on his own fist so he wouldn’t make any more sounds as Amy went at him like a ravenous little animal. Only, who was Amy?
He told his mother that he was feeling much better, although the opposite was true. He left his office to get a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee, a stiff drink, electroconvulsive shock therapy—he clearly needed something. He was so dazed that he caromed off the desk outside his office, the desk that belonged to his assistant. Aimee. Aimee. Who had dark hair, long legs, and vivid lips that were conspicuously pale this morning, lips that he suddenly knew were usually tinted the shade of the lipstick he had found in his car.
“Morning, Bob,” she said, somehow making them the two most terrifying words he had ever heard. Suddenly, their history was there, rushing at him like a montage. It was mainly a montage of sex, heated, nasty, secret sex, like the incident in the powder room. Wonderful sex. Why would he break up with her? True, the memories carried a whiff of crazy, but then, the crazy ones were always best. How did he know that? How could he know that? He had been married to—someone—for . . . a while, a long while. He had never cheated on good old what’s-her-name. Well, never cheated in a way that really counted, just a convention here or there, a Christmas party at the old company, back when things were a little more freewheeling. Strange, he could remember those instances in great detail, but he couldn’t remember that—who was he trying to remember? Something else was nagging him, something that was making him anxious and fearful. He had forgotten something important. A presentation? A staff meeting?
“Have you thought about what we discussed, Bob? About your decision?”
“Of course,” he said. He was clueless.
“And—?”
“I haven’t reached a decision just yet.” Bob, an old hand at drifting off in meetings, had an endless supply of stock expressions guaranteed to ease one back into almost any conversation. Keep it vague, use the other person’s words, and eventually the topic will be revealed.
“Well, you better,” Aimee said. “By the end of the week, Bob. I meant what I said.”
He continued on to the coffee station, feeling as if he had two brains. One was emptying, leaking facts and details slowly but steadily, while the other compartment seemed to be filling with a floodwater of information, so much coming at him at once that he couldn’t sort things out. Then, in the next instant, he had all these new vivid memories of sex and golf—not sex with golf, but sex, with Aimee and many others, followed by separate memories of exceptional golfing experiences. The other arriving details were slower to cohere, but each one seemed to cost him a piece of his old life. His personal life, through age twenty-one, was consistent between the two spheres. It was there, about the time he met . . . what’s-her-name, that a chasm opened and his mind separated like an egg. He was Bob, but he had never been married, much less been a, what was it called? A father. He had never been a father. His mother was worried about this. She had lectured him just the other day, when he’d said he was breaking up with Aimee/Amy, that he needed to settle down, if only for the sake of his career and health. “Married men live longer,” his mother had said. “And while the bosses can’t publicly discriminate against you for being single, other people can’t help judging a man who isn’t settled.”
But they can fire your ass, a voice in Bob’s brain said, for having an affair with your assistant, which is specifically prohibited under the company’s sexual harassment policy.
The voice was not his but Aimee’s. She had delivered this warning, he realized, after he had informed her this past Monday that he wanted to stop “seeing” her. Which was a polite word for what had been, and what was supposed to remain, a clandestine relationship. Her arrival on his mother’s doorstep during his Christmas visit had been the deciding factor in trying to cool things off. She had introduced herself to Bob’s family as his girlfriend before he could do anything. She had used the surname Smith and the not exactly fake first name, making a big point of the fact that it was not spelled the French way, as if that were a sufficient disguise. He had realized then that he would have to stop seeing her, but it was hard. For one thing, Aimee seemed to have an unerring instinct for when he might introduce the topic and, even in public, would find a way to start doing things that would distract him.
For another, she could cost him everything. While they were together, she had no interest in bringing anyone’s attention to their affair. The secrecy had fueled their encounters. The secrecy and Aimee’s craziness. But after the incident over the holidays, he knew he had to end things, and he had finally summoned the nerve Monday, after announcing his plan to his mother on Sunday. He had even considered it a kind of trial run for firing Paul, in fact: dispatch Aimee Monday evening, then tell Paul the bad news on Wednesday. After surviving Aimee’s histrionics, it had been a bizarre relief, just doing a straightforward dismissal, although Paul had been kind of a prick about it, and the others had sulked, said Bob had no backbone, made those stupid jokes about Klink and Schultz. They couldn’t see the big picture. If Bob didn’t bend from time to time, the big bosses would break them all. Now it was Thursday and he had until the end of the week—
To give Paul’s job to Aimee. Which made no sense, as he had told Aimee repeatedly. He really did have to trim the payroll in their department. And while Amy would start at the lower end of the pay grade, people would g
ossip if he brought her in immediately after dumping Paul, maybe even speculate. But if he didn’t give her Paul’s job, she would tell the big bosses about the affair, and he would be fired.
How had he gotten into this situation? He had vague memories of wanting to be a different kind of guy, someone more stable and steady, like his two brothers and his brother-in-law. He was the big earner in the family and his mother’s favorite. She didn’t even try to hide that fact, and the others didn’t seem to resent it, not much. Perhaps they even felt a little sorry for him, his big salary and big house aside.
Bob somehow managed to get through the day, ignoring Aimee’s glares. Ignoring, too, the reproachful looks of his staff, the burning sensation in his gut. He stopped at a restaurant for dinner alone, but he couldn’t kill more than an hour. At home, he started to watch ESPN, but took a spin around the satellite, bumping into an interesting batch of programs. Oh, right, he had Cinemax now. He snaked his hand into his pants, but it felt a little lonely. He glanced at his cell phone, noticed that Aimee’s number was right there under “A.” Not much of a code, but convenient.
“You know what?” he said when she answered. “I think I can swing it.”
“Oh, Bob,” she said. Her voice was warm, moist, almost as if she were there, breathing into his ear. Bob didn’t really find his ears that exciting, but Aimee seemed to.
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