by Emma Straub
The house was small and tightly packed: cleats and flip-flops by the door in an overflowing basket, jackets haphazardly flung onto hooks. The living room was lined with bookshelves, with two well-used sofas, one of which held a sleeping dog, the other, a sleeping cat, each curled into donuts. Before Porter made it all the way across the living room and into the kitchen, she knew what she would find there: overflowing bowls of snacks and fruit, a Sharpie’d height chart on the wall. The whole house was a diamond ring.
“So where’s the family?” Porter slid onto a stool at the kitchen counter.
Jeremy shrugged. “A mediocre hotel restaurant with a dozen smelly children, I’m guessing? Soccer tournament, the travel team.”
“Aha,” Porter said. “And you don’t have to be at work right now?”
“This seemed interesting enough to take a break for.” Jeremy opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of white wine with one hand and a bottle of seltzer with the other. “Thirsty?”
“It’s ten in the morning, what’s wrong with you?!” Porter said. “Fizzy water is fine. And are you really going to? What if you have to operate on someone’s cat?”
Jeremy shrugged and put the water in front of Porter. “Keeps things loose,” he said. “I’m kidding.” Being in someone’s house was like having immediate access to their private world. Not just their things, their objects, but also what they fed themselves, what they made with their own hands to fill their body.
In all their time together, Jeremy had never made Porter a meal—the opportunity had never presented itself. She had no idea whether he could cook or not, which seemed like an enormous thing not to know about someone you’d had sex with so many times. Porter popped a cashew into her mouth before she’d fully taken in the bowl in front of her. There were things to eat everywhere, it was heaven. She wondered what kind of sheets Jeremy had, if he had a ceiling fan, if there was a place to sit in the backyard, if he thought about her when he masturbated, if his wife ever watched him, the way Porter sometimes did in hotel rooms. There was a wedding photo on the bookshelf, and Porter looked away quickly. It was harder to ignore his other life when she was sitting in his house, where she was surrounded by proof of it, but she wasn’t interested in changing direction now.
“Egg sandwiches?” Jeremy pulled open the heavy stainless steel door of the fridge. Had that fridge come with the house? It looked new. Shopping for appliances—that was something they’d never done together.
“Okay,” Porter said. “I’ll be your assistant.” It felt more like when they were teenagers than it had in years. Jeremy’s parents’ house had been carpeted everywhere—the kitchen, the stairs, even the ceiling of the basement rec room. The house had always smelled like the inside of a kennel, which it was, more or less, with one or two wounded animals always limping around. Porter looked around Jeremy’s messy kitchen. What did his wife complain about? Porter couldn’t think of one thing, not counting the sex he’d been having on the side. And that wasn’t a problem anymore, which made it vanish into the air, a rain cloud pushed farther across the sky.
Jeremy left the fridge open and walked away, across the room to the screen door, which he then propped open, revealing the backyard, with a wooden playhouse, a stainless steel grill, and a small table with benches. A bird feeder hung in the nearest tree. It was almost too much.
“Not bad,” Porter said, peeking through the doorway, as if she hadn’t seen a thousand photos of him and his kids frolicking in the patchy grass.
Jeremy walked back to the fridge and started piling things up on the counter—a loaf of bread, two eggs, a hunk of what Porter recognized as her own cheese. He’d thought of her, before the second she showed up outside the clinic. She wondered if he ever dreamed that she was sleeping next to him and woke up surprised to have his arms around his wife. Jeremy leaned over Porter to reach a pan and then turned on the stove. She stood next to him, their bodies almost touching, and side by side, watching the eggs cook.
“So, Porter,” Jeremy said. “What’s the story?”
Porter thought about it. She hadn’t had sex with anyone for so long—more than a year—the longest dry spell in her adult life. Her body was only getting bigger, and once the baby came, what would dating be like? This was what her mother worried about, Porter knew, among other things, and it killed her that she agreed. No one really knew what changes motherhood could bring—to the body, to the sex drive, to anything. It was like going to another country and knowing that you could never go home again. In the not-too-distant future, everything would be different, and Porter could no sooner imagine it than she could imagine life after death. But standing in the warm morning air, Porter knew what the story was, the story happening right at that moment. Jeremy slid the eggs onto the bread.
It was not a date, it had not been a date. She stood next to Jeremy and stared straight ahead at the food in front of them, her stomach grumbling with hunger she hadn’t known was there—and then extended one hand and put it at the lowest part of his back. Jeremy closed his eyes, a butter knife in his hand. He let the knife fall to the counter and pulled Porter’s hand around to his stomach, putting it flat against the cotton of his T-shirt. It wasn’t sudden if you counted the last twenty years as a very, very slow courtship, or if you blinked and the last two years disappeared like a bad dream.
“Hmm,” Porter said.
“Hmm,” Jeremy said, and slid her hand farther south until it rested against his newly sprung erection.
They were kissing, and then they were peeling clothes off each other like they were being timed by a trainer with a stopwatch. His tongue was clumsy, so eager, slipping in and out of her mouth. Porter was grateful for the light coming in through the open door to the backyard, and through the windows. She licked his belly button; she couldn’t help it. Being in Jeremy’s house was sexier than a thousand pristine hotel rooms, which by design felt temporary. Being in his house felt like the moment in the A-ha video where they step out of the cartoon. This was real life.
“Are you . . . ,” he said, his eyes on her belly.
“I’m pregnant,” she said. “On my own.” Porter didn’t want to wait for him to ask, for him to imagine that there was someone else, which was of course ridiculous, but there it was.
“Okay, I can see that,” Jeremy said. “You look so beautiful, Porter. Goddamn. I mean it. Does that mean I can skip the condom?”
Porter thought about it. “Yes, just stick it in, do it, before I change my mind and ask you too many questions.”
Jeremy didn’t have to be asked twice. The rag rug in the kitchen felt good against her back, but then she remembered the baby and rolled Jeremy over so that she was on top. She came in minutes, and Jeremy quivered under her. Porter lifted a knee and he rolled away and then carried her over to the sofa, where he laid her back and went down on her with such mastery that she laughed.
“You are fucking efficient,” Porter said. “I’m sorry that I’m pregnant, if that’s weird. I mean, I’m not sorry that I’m pregnant, I’m happy that I’m pregnant. I just mean that I’m sorry I didn’t officially tell you before I took my clothes off.”
“Being pregnant is nine months without a baby. It’s cool.” He’d done this before, of course. It was both comforting and disconcerting to remember that Jeremy had had sex with a pregnant woman before. Marriage was something that Porter didn’t quite understand, a fact for which she blamed her mother. Or rather, she blamed her father’s death, and then her mother’s ease with being alone. Her father had died before she’d moved out of the solipsistic period of youth, when parents existed only in relation to their children, not to each other. They’d been so close to the empty nest, her parents, and to whatever phase would come next. Porter felt sorry for her mother, for the very first time—Astrid would be horrified, maybe even more horrified than she would be about what Porter had just done on the Fogelmans’ kitchen floor.
For her whole life, Porter had imagined she’d have a marriage just like her parents—fine. They fought but only sometimes. They were affectionate but only sometimes. They rolled their eyes at the dinner table and saved their big arguments for when the kids were out of earshot. That seemed like the goal—another person to help manage the logistics of a full, busy life, someone whose face you liked, someone you could live with for fifty years without throwing each other out the window. Nicky made marriage look like an art project, and Elliot made it look like prison. Porter could count on one hand the number of married couples whose relationships she actually coveted, and most of them were famous people (Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, Barack and Michelle Obama), so who knew what was really happening behind closed doors.
She looked at Jeremy and tried to remember why she hadn’t wanted to marry him when she was twenty. She was too young, that was all. What a fucking ridiculous choice, what hubris! To think that there would be an unlimited number of willing suitors, like on The Bachelor, an endless line of men stepping out of a clown car limousine. Porter hadn’t seen Jeremy’s bedroom and so she just pictured his teenage bedroom at the top of the stairs of his adult house, the posters of Patrick Ewing and Pamela Anderson at her Baywatch best. His children—full-size humans with enormous backpacks and orthodontist appointments—didn’t matter to her. They were something else entirely, as remote a concept as having been born a boy, or with three eyeballs. His wife wasn’t there, and Porter banished her to the outer limits of her psychic galaxy. There was only so much room inside her body. Pregnancy was so bizarre, so full of unanticipated effects and side effects and side-side effects that Porter felt both connected to every woman who had ever lived and also like she were the first person on earth who this had happened to.
“So why did you come to see me?” Jeremy asked, his head half buried under the blanket over her lap. “I fucking missed you, Porter.”
Porter petted Jeremy’s neck, following its smooth curve down his spine. “I missed you too.” The dog—it was called Ginger, she remembered—woke up and ambled over, pressing her wet nose into Porter’s palm. She closed her eyes and pretended it all belonged to her: the dog, the house, the boy. Maybe it still could. It was delusional, she knew, but Porter also knew that this was her last chance at delusion. Soon she would have to shape up, to get her head on straight, to set limits on candy and screen time and curfews and whatever evil thing came down the pike that no one had even heard of yet. Right now, she was still just herself, just one person, with no one to answer to. And so if she wanted to fuck her ex on his kitchen floor, she was going to. Porter didn’t believe that everything happened for a reason—that was absurd—but she did believe that one thing led to the next. Her mom had fallen in love with no consideration of the consequences, Porter had run into her old best friend, and all that had led her to Jeremy’s office, and then his car had led her to his house, and then their bodies had come back together in the way they had always, always done so well, that had led them here, to this moment, which felt like a beginning or at least the opening of a door.
When Jeremy drove them back to his office, and Porter got back into her car to go home, she put her forehead against the steering wheel and cried. She was happy. Doing stupid things didn’t have to be wasted on the young.
Chapter 17
Wendy Wakes Up
It was 12:30 P.M., which meant that Wendy had just begun to enjoy two full hours of silence. The boys were freshly three, and she knew they wouldn’t nap forever, and maybe shouldn’t even still be napping now, seeing as they woke up at five A.M., but Wendy would rather be up before dawn and get a break in the middle of the day. Next year, they would be in school, and they would be someone else’s problem, then they could stop napping. Oh, how Wendy hated her friends who had daughters, dutiful little creatures who could sit quietly at a table with nothing more than a piece of paper and a cupful of colored pencils. If her children were awake, they were running at top speed, screaming like Mel Gibson in Braveheart. She wore earplugs when the pitch got too high, which was often. She now hid pillboxes of earplugs in nearly every room of the house, like an addict hiding their stash.
Wendy sat in her home office, a room with no purpose other than organizing their lives. She worked twenty hours a week, a minuscule amount, in New Paltz, and she loved those twenty hours like she loved oxygen. She loved the boring parts, the tedious parts, the scrolling through emails until she forgot what she was looking for. She loved the watercooler, mostly because it was never her job to change it when the supply was getting low. She did not buy the toilet paper; thrillingly, she didn’t even replace a roll when there were only a few squares left. She was responsible for neither making her co-workers’ lunch nor ensuring that they ate it. Her home office was supposed to be a space where she could do work if she needed to, and she did answer an email inside its walls from time to time, but really it was just a nicely designed closet. It was where all the family’s papers were filed, the things no one wanted to look at but were afraid to throw away: previous years’ taxes, health insurance forms, bank statements. The room had a window overlooking the backyard, which was strewn with large plastic toys in primary colors, oversize baseball bats, and shrunken basketball hoops. Elliot wanted them to be athletes, though thus far both boys had shown an aptitude only for total destruction. It was a beautiful day outside, and a breeze blew the tree branches. Wendy wondered how much wind it would take to blow the whole house down.
* * *
—
She had pushed for Chappaqua, Bedford, Scarsdale, something that would have made the commute into the city seem like a doable crunch, and not the soul-crushing plot of a deranged workaholic, as it was from Clapham. This was before she was pregnant. Elliot had almost agreed. Minty-breathed Realtors had driven slowly past town landmarks, past top-rated public schools, past quaint houses and brand-new ones. She nearly had him, but then she’d gotten pregnant sooner than she thought—Wendy was pragmatic and had planned for trying for at least a year, at her age, with her history (every woman had a history). But once the egg had implanted and she’d told Elliot, Wendy knew they weren’t leaving Clapham. He called his mother first. Wendy asked her mother to come when the baby was born, and then before too long they knew that the baby would be two babies, and she was needed all the more.
Living in Clapham was like living in a Strick museum. This was the house where her husband had lost his virginity. This was the field he and his friends used on the Fourth of July to send illegal fireworks zooming into space. This was the restaurant with the best hamburger, this was the bar with the best booths. He was the expert in their lives, and she was his tourist. When they had the twins, she became an expert in them, which was enough, for a little while. Aidan would sleep for only forty-five minutes at a time, Zachary preferred applesauce and yogurt mixed together in an equal ratio. Aidan would pee on the potty but not more, Zachary would always, always go in a diaper, until she took the diapers away and threw them into the garbage with a grand flourish, as she had previously done with the pacifiers. Elliot would come home and announce his amazement at her work. Her “work.” It was work, of course, but when he said it, she knew that he whispered those quotation marks, that he thought anything that took place inside their house’s walls was playtime. As if children’s playtime was playtime for their parents. As if it wasn’t work, to keep the house and the children from bursting into flames, to keep herself from lighting the match. Men understood so little.
When Wendy was seven months pregnant, her mother arrived from San Francisco—twins came early, and both Chan women liked to be prepared. Wendy’s father stayed at home—truthfully, was there ever a more useless figure than a grandfather? Vivian Chan chose the bedroom next to the twins’, though there was an au pair suite on the first floor, by the garage, with its own door and a small kitchenette. She would move down there when the boys were sleeping through the night, she said, and she did, when they were six months old.
Wendy had always loved her mother, in her own way, the way one loves an airplane for not crashing into a mountainside, but once the boys were born, she appreciated her too. The two women spent days together without speaking, passing things back and forth without more than a nod: a diaper, a pack of wipes, a bottle, a swaddle. They were synchronized swimmers. Elliot was their absentee coach, who occasionally wandered into the room and found them each holding a sleeping child and offered an enthusiastic thumbs-up, wandering out again before he could ask if their arms had fallen asleep, if they were hungry or thirsty, if they could reach their phones. When her mother had returned to San Francisco after the boys’ first birthday, Wendy wept more than she had ever wept in her life.
Just as Wendy had turned into something else when the children were born, so had Elliot, only she had taken a step toward the rest of human experience, and he had taken a step back, shaken as he was by the visceral fluids, the menial tasks, and the tedium. He had no training—he’d said that to Wendy, incredulous at her request that he help her change Aidan one morning, when her mother and Zachary were already downstairs, and Aidan had produced an incredible, bright yellow dal of a bowel movement, which covered his lower half, his back, the changing table pad, and Wendy’s two hands. He’d said this to her as if her classes at Princeton had included Home Ec and Childcare 101. As if there were a manual, and she’d read it. (There were manuals, of course, hundreds of contradictory books, and she’d read dozens of them, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that she always left the books, underlined and dog-eared, on his side of the bed, and he’d never opened them.)
Wendy was deciding what to do: She could nap on top of the made bed, she could fold laundry, she could make meatballs for the boys’ supper, she could do one of her exercise videos. She decided to nap, or at least rest her eyes, and walked back over to the master bedroom, which was a suite of its own—his and hers closets, even his and hers toilets inside the master bathroom. Astrid had been appalled when they’d showed her the plans—it was the biggest house Elliot had ever built, and like his office, significantly bigger than the house it was replacing. There were so many big old houses in Clapham, houses just like the Big House, that was Astrid’s argument, as if she were telling them to remember to recycle their paper and plastic garbage. But they hadn’t wanted someone else’s house. Wendy liked things clean as much as Elliot did, fresh, and it was his job, to build new things. Astrid had never understood Elliot—it felt cruel to Wendy to even think that about another mother, but it was true. It also felt good to remember that she and Elliot were united on some things, the way they used to be with everything. She fell back onto her side of the bed and scooched upward until her head was on the pillow. She could nap this way, without mussing herself or the sheets, for at least thirty minutes. Wendy had just closed her eyes when she heard the garage door peel open.