“If he goes he’ll just do it again.”
“Sy.”
“What, won’t he? You don’t think he will?”
Deb looked at him. “No, I really don’t.”
“Yeah, and you didn’t think he would at all, so that’s how much you know.”
Deb wavered a little in the air. Here was their son and they’d made him so angry. Jack, maybe mostly, but she had too. What would Simon say if she told him how she’d known already, known for months, and had done nothing. That she’d tried just to make it go away. Probably he’d say she was weak, and dumb. And what if Simon knew the facts about how his own parents’ marriage had started? Probably he’d say she was dirty. And deserving, now.
“If that’s how you feel,” she said. “He can stay out here, on the couch. Okay?”
Simon nodded. His mother’s face was damp from the water she’d splashed on it and he could see the pores on her cheeks in the light from the window. Again he’d been cruel.
The talk was over without Kay saying anything. If it had been left to her, she would have had her father stay at the studio. She was afraid of running into him in the kitchen or coming out from the bathroom. She was afraid of what he might try to say. The house seemed a so much safer place when it was just the three of them. But she never would have thought of what her brother said, about her father doing it again, she didn’t have a mind like his, and she guessed it was better that he had been the one to answer.
—
It was late, but still no one had really eaten, and so they ordered Chinese food, too much, enough for six or seven but more important, enough for four. Simon, then Kay, then Deb, marched a plate out to the living room to sit in front of the TV. Deb left the food containers and an empty plate on the counter like a live mouse trap, and before long Jack came creeping out from the back of the apartment where he’d spent the last half hour in a state of self-imposed but well-received quarantine. He took an empty space on the couch just behind Simon, who was stretched out on the floor, and neither child elected to break the tunnel vision that ran invisible between The Daily Show and their General Tso’s chicken.
Jack ate hunched over with great, heaping mouthfuls, like an animal afraid his food might be taken from him. The size of his portions offended Deb in some way she could hardly explain, and she caught herself scowling. She grew angrier watching him watch the television, his attention also nearly ravenous, invasive somehow. She was too angry for this, and regretted the peace offering, regretted it until Simon, at the first commercial, picked up his dinner, which he’d hardly touched, and left the room, stopping for no one, even when she called his name. Her son’s anger deflated her own, as though serving as her proxy, and Deb again felt sorry for Jack.
—
That night the kids kept clear of the hall for their father’s lonely procession, living room to bedroom to living room again, and Deb got into bed with the mangled pages, her husband’s words.
The dirty stuff didn’t bother her so much as when he was sweet, though she supposed that was a predictable thing to feel. Before a weekend trip to D.C., the girl had written to him that she didn’t like Washington, that everything about it had a hum. Jack wrote back, Hummmmmmmmmmmm. Thought of you the whole day.
Deb’s heart also quickened anytime she saw mention of herself on the page, and she always went back and read that section slowly, coming to her name in natural order. Deb’s asleep early. Just me in the living room, lonely for this afternoon. She wasn’t sure if it was out of superstition or if she got some sort of perverse pleasure in the delay, in making herself wait, but she did the same thing when she saw the names of her children. Promised to go to Kay’s play Friday. That was in November, and it hadn’t been a play but a dance concert.
There was a knock at the door, and Jack shuffled in to the closet where they kept extra bedding.
“I wish you wouldn’t keep looking at that.” He pulled down a gray blanket, one of those fleecy ones nobody liked the feel of, and was leaning forward on his toes, reaching further back. She watched him tug the corner of one toward the bottom and send the whole pile onto the floor. “Sorry,” he said, bending down and popping up again with a thin, yellowy quilt that might have been white when they bought it. “I saw on the calendar, Kay’s got a field trip?”
“So?”
“Mind if I pick her up?” The quilt had been Simon’s when they first moved him crib to bed, and she wondered if Jack realized, if that was why he chose it. Probably not, no.
“You do what you want.”
He nodded, quilt aloft, and went back out to the living room to sleep.
I want you to sit for me tomorrow around noon. Bring that belt from before. I’ll only have a couple hours but I think we can get to everything by then.
Ninety-two percent of Americans disapprove of extramarital affairs. Deb had done some research, online. Sixty-four percent would not forgive an unfaithful spouse, and sixty-two percent would divorce one. The site did not explain the other two percent, who neither forgave nor divorced. Catholics. Catholics or possibly black widows.
She’d taken her lawyer friend’s advice. She’d waited. Time was the trick everyone else knew already. Hold on long enough, let the heaviness dry in the air, and it does not seem necessary to do anything at all. Jack was fifty-five to her forty-one and had seen firsthand what time could do. “Do me a favor,” Ruth had whispered as the kids turned the bulbs on grandma’s menorah. “Don’t talk to him unless you’re sure.”
And in the interim, what had happened? The sex had gotten better. Or at least, they’d started having it again, rougher and for longer, even if sometimes she wanted to slap him across the face when he pinched. Deb made changes, but they were with herself, part of a decision to work at being happy.
Jack used to make her happy. She was twenty-six when they met, a young twenty-six. You had to choose between dancing and living, and up until that point she hadn’t lived. Her only boyfriends had worked in offices, done things with money she didn’t understand. They’d liked to show her off, hadn’t liked that she always went home early. They hadn’t known how to touch her, afraid of breaking her or, worse, wanting to. Jack had never been that way; he hadn’t had to be, and for that she gave herself willingly to him, throwing dance away just as it had begun to fail her, and it was a lot to ask of a person, maybe, to let you make them your whole world. His work she felt she understood, art that was like hers except it lasted, didn’t disappear behind a curtain. The best a dancer can do is bring life to another person’s steps. Jack didn’t have steps to follow. He made his own. An artist seemed the greatest thing one could be, also the purest, and her whole life shrunk next to that, her father the salesman, her mother the secretary. She hadn’t learned to look for the difference yet between what one did and who one was. Hadn’t even known there was a difference.
Things are usually described as better in the morning, and maybe they are, for some people. Jack preferred the night, when everything seemed at last to be at a close. He was out in the living room, yes, but he was home, and the day was over—the nightmare, he thought, over. There goes everything, the show, the career. There, my life. I’ll never speak to anyone again, not to the guy from the Voice or the woman from KIOSK, not to Stanley, not even to Nicky. But at least, sleep.
But then, morning, and instead of speaking to Stanley never again, here he was speaking to him now. Jack had wanted only to stop the incessant buzzing by his head, to shut off his phone’s alarm, but the alarm had started talking, and in a voice very much like Stanley’s.
Like Stanley’s, but harder. Colder. All-business Stanley. “The woman seems all right, but she’ll press charges.”
“She said that?” Jack rolled onto his side, propping his head up on his hand and squinting in the morning light. Blinds would have ruined the picture windows.
“Right now she says she won’t—most likely, she says—but she called a lawyer in to the hospital.”
“She’s stil
l at the hospital?”
“I think she needed a scan—”
“What they should do is check her into the psych ward.”
“I think it would help if you released some sort of statement. We could do it on your behalf, but—”
“If I make a statement, do we reopen?”
There was a pause, and Stanley sighed. “What you aren’t getting, Jack, is that everyone who was in that gallery last night could sue for something. And they wouldn’t be going after you.”
“Then why don’t you sue me, Stanley?”
“Be serious.”
“Look, say what you want to say. Write up any little release you want, and I’ll sign it, all right?”
“We don’t need you to sign—”
“You know what? I don’t have time for bullshit; do what you want. Just make it go away.”
Stanley hung up, but Jack stayed with the phone to his ear. He checked the time under the TV. Not yet seven. Stanley was one of his oldest friends, but what kind? He’d gotten rid of Stanley, but he wasn’t really done talking, so he called Nicky.
“Nicolo! You’re awake,” Jack boomed, detecting a whiff of subdued life on the other end of the line. “I’m glad I caught you. Meet at the studio? I can be there in an hour.”
“I have work.”
“Right, right. Shit. Where’re you at again?”
“Man, please, do not come to my work.”
“What? Maybe I want a Frappucino.”
—
At half past nine, Jack was at the coffee shop at Astor Place. He ordered an americano.
“What size?”
“Whatever, large.”
“Come on, boss, you know the sizes.”
“Venti. Nicky, look, it’s clear you’ve been hibernating the last fifteen hours, but at some point while you’re up for air, you’re going to hear some things about last night.” A line was forming behind him. “Ring me up for one of these biscotti things too.”
“Was the video not okay?”
“We didn’t get that far.” He fished a credit card out from his back pocket. “Listen, you remember that girl, Jordan Esberg?” Last October, when Jack was starting to worry things were getting too serious, he’d wondered out loud why the girl had never shown an interest in Nicky. Maybe they should give it a shot. They were about the same age. The girl had stared at him; Jack had smiled. What? He really did just want everyone to be happy. “Do you think you could reach her for me?”
“I don’t even think I have her number still.” That Halloween, while Jack and Deb stayed home distributing fun-size candy bars to ghosties and junior pirates, Nicky and the girl had gone to a costume party. “Can’t you reach her?”
“She’s been ignoring my calls.”
“If she doesn’t want to talk to you, I definitely don’t think she’d talk to me. I don’t get it. Why would she be ignoring your calls?”
Another employee appeared behind the register, the manager in a green corporate visor. “Friend of yours, Nick?”
“I’m a customer.” Jack wielded his biscotti.
Nicky handed him back his card and receipt. “Your drink’ll be at the bar, sir.”
At the bar Jack ate his stick of cookie, which was stale and crumbed on the keyboard of his phone. The day after Nicky and the girl’s date, All Saints’ Day, Nicky had turned up at the studio with a pair of sparkling black wings that she had left at his apartment that morning, tiptoeing out while he was still asleep. A few hours later the girl had come to Jack and when she did he teased her about it, her obvious intentions, to make him jealous. He made her angry, then made nice with her, pushing up her short sleeves and kissing her round shoulders, the knobby back of her neck, until she began to smile and tell him about her night, sliding out of her clothes and into her wings before leading him to the sofa, floating glitter and doom all behind her.
The trial by dinner had not been a total catastrophe, but it had helped Deb to make her decision, and the next morning, on the walk to Simon’s subway station and Kay’s school bus, she wedged herself between them to talk about What Next. Again she found herself using old standards, the clichés, like, people make mistakes, and wondered if the kids recognized them as such, or if she could get away with it because of their ages. Were they too young to know the words were rewarmed?
“What your dad did has nothing to do with the two of you,” she said at the corner, barricading them back as she looked both ways. “It isn’t about you. It isn’t even really about me,” she added. (Did she believe that?) “Mostly it’s about himself.”
“Okay,” Simon said, knocking into her arm as he hopped off the curb.
“Your father and I have been married a long long time. People make mistakes.”
“You said that already,” said Kay.
There. So now it was a cliché.
Simon stopped short at the newsstand across the street. “It’s okay if you guys want to get a divorce,” he said, pulling open the glass refrigerator door. “Can I get a water?” He shook the wet off the bottle and looked down at the morning papers.
“Well, thank you for your permission.”
“Donald’s parents got divorced and it’s not like his dad even did anything.”
“That’s enough, all right? Be a little sensitive.” Deb draped an arm around her daughter. “Sweetheart, you want something? A Snickers or something?”
“Can I get gum?”
“And can I get this?” Simon held up a Post. “For the train.”
“I’ll buy you the Times.”
“This is cheaper.”
“I’d rather you read the Times.”
“But this one has sudoku.”
“Fine,” Deb said, and bought everything. Thinking: We have raised two entirely city children. She and Jack had reared these urban creatures, so different from themselves, a southern boy and a suburban girl. Art and dance had carried them to the city, but what kept them—kept Deb, at least—was the sense that it all was happening there for the first time, would ripple out in lesser versions across the country, like touring companies of a Broadway show, like everything everywhere else was an echo of something that had happened there. She never took New York for granted, but it had never belonged to her like it did to her kids, and there was still that pane of glass between herself and where she lived, showing her her reflection, in the darker places, where she was afraid. How could she guess at what her children were afraid of, then? Were they afraid of anything?
Simon had started down the subway stairs when Deb called him back. “Listen.” Pressing her palm against the strap of his bag. “I don’t know about Donald’s parents. I know that your dad is sorry, and I know that this takes time to figure out. And he knows that too.”
“So, what, he’s going to be sleeping on the couch?”
“Does that bother you guys?”
“It’s just Donald is coming over tonight.” He telescoped and untelescoped his Post.
It is so hard to know the right thing and so important to make it seem easy. “Your father will be in our bedroom, then.”
That, as far as Simon was concerned, settled it, and Jack was permitted back into Deb’s bed to steel the family from judgment by a fifteen-year-old boy named Donald.
(Though Simon would keep Donald out of it, he’d also managed a way of inviting the rest of the world in, with that stuff he’d said in the elevator, and now several of the building people, moms mostly, had begun to look at him funny. They looked at his parents that way too, and at Kay, though his family, surprise, hardly noticed.
The moms looked at him on afternoons in the elevator, where he felt himself cornered by their grocery bags and laundry baskets. He stared out the little round window with wire netting as the floors fell away behind it. Swallowing hard.
They looked at him and thought, Poor kid.
They looked at each other and thought, With a husband like that, might have guessed. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist, no. Doesn’t take a Freud.
<
br /> They looked at their watches and thought, Two-thirty, what are you doing home from school?
16B was the only one to ask him questions. Like their medium, if he were a ghost.
She asked: “How are we doing?” We.
And then not just questions but mottoes, like, “One day at a time.” This she said to no one, to the air.
Well wasn’t it what he wanted, attention? Yes, in a way it was. But just as important now was to show how much he didn’t need any. That he was handling it, without his too-young sister and too-dumb mother and his father who was the problem. And without 16B. Because he’d seen this story before, on night soaps and in his friends’ parents’ living rooms. He knew what came next, and he wanted to show the world and the building people, everyone, that he was ready. Divorce!)
Jerry and Elaine are married and living in Jerry’s apartment with George next door instead of Kramer. George gets a letter by mistake from a woman who is having an affair with Jerry. He goes to Monk’s to tell Elaine, and she is like, So? George says: “But she said she is sleeping with your husband! Jerry!” And Elaine’s still like, Yeah, so? LAUGHS. George says: “She said she wanted him to lick her on the nipples!” Elaine puts her hand on the table like she’s about to leave and says: “Listen, Peterman has me writing about urban riding crops. I don’t have time for this.” And George shouts: “She said she was going to suck him off until he came and that she would swallow it and that he tasted good and then that he should fuck her hard against the wall!” Everyone at Monk’s is staring at them. Elaine says: “George, I don’t know why you are shouting.” LAUGHS.
—
“What are you writing?”
Kay snapped back into the mustardy yellow bus rumbling down the West Side Highway, delivering her class to the planetarium. Two braids hung above her head: Chloe Haber looking over the back of Kay’s seat, squinting to read.
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