“The worst part was getting off the plane the next day,” said Jerry. “We passed a newsstand in the terminal, and there I was on the cover of the National Enquirer, trying to make out with Phoebe. And there’s this stupid headline that says, ‘Georgia’s Hot Jamaican Rendezvous.’“
“Can anyone tell it’s you?” asked Carl.
“I can tell it’s me. You’d think they’d realize that Colby McGeever doesn’t have a huge striking cobra tattooed on his back. At least you can’t really see Phoebe. That would have pissed me off. I was already mad as hell about not getting a chance to use the Jacuzzi.”
“But it was kind of fun, anyway,” I said. “Once we gave up and moved into the bathroom, we had a decent time. We played Scattergories a lot.”
“How was your family get-together?” Antonia asked.
I rubbed the back of Jerry’s shoulders. “It was pretty good. We finally got to meet Rhett. I mean, Colby. It’s hard to remember to call him that.”
“What was he like?”
“He’s a redneck,” said Jerry. “It’s a riot.”
Antonia looked at me for confirmation. “A redneck?”
“Yeah, he’s kind of a good old boy. Gets a little noisy after a couple of beers. I could see Madison putting up with him, though. She’s got a pretty good tolerance for crude jokes and bodily functions.”
Carl looked confused. “This is the guy who was playing Rhett Butler?”
“Not exactly. He was just putting on this kind of charming, sophisticated act for the cameras. Apparently they paid him about forty grand to do it. That’s more than he makes in a year, normally.”
“I heard he was a plumber,” said Antonia.
“Yeah, but he also used to be a male model,” I added. “I guess that’s why he knew how to look right on camera. He’s pretty buff.” Jerry gave me a dirty look.
“Is it true he has a criminal record?” asked Carl. The server came up with our pizzas and set them down in the middle of the table, wiggling them free of the dishtowels he was using as hot pads.
“Does he ever. What all has he been arrested for, Jerry?”
Jerry’s eyes rolled upward, thinking. “Let’s see…simple battery…illegal gambling…public intoxication, of course…was it auto theft?”
“Once, I think,” I affirmed.
“Failure to pay child support, and solicitation of prostitution.”
Carl and Antonia laughed. “The guy’s been busy,” said Carl.
Antonia looked at me questioningly. “And this doesn’t bother your sister?”
“It doesn’t seem to. She always dated bad boys in high school. They’re not very serious offenses, really, except for the auto theft. Like the child support one, I think the mother of one of his kids filed for four years of back support at once and he couldn’t pay it fast enough.”
“The mother of one of his kids? How many does he have?”
“Two or three. I’m under the impression that the jury’s still out on one of them. It’s the prostitution charge that would really bother me. That would be ‘have a nice life,’ right there.”
“I would think so,” agreed Antonia. “And your sister’s a very pretty girl. It seems like she could get anyone she wanted. She doesn’t need to settle for some scummy drunk.”
“I know, but not every guy comes with an entourage of cameras from every major network.”
“No, I guess not. Are they really going to get married?”
“Madison seems to think so. Jerry’s not in agreement. He thinks they’ll get fed up with each other once they’ve spent some time in the real world. I don’t know how much they even see each other, though. They always seem to be in different cities.”
Antonia smiled at Jerry. “You don’t think it’ll last?”
“I don’t know,” Jerry shrugged. “Beats me. Maybe.”
“Oh, come on. That’s not what you said yesterday.” I nudged his arm and noticed he looked ghostly white, with pinpoint beads of sweat around his hairline. “Hey, are you all right?”
He nodded and wiped the sweat off with the side of his hand.
“The wedding’s going to be on TV, right?” asked Antonia.
I wiped the tomato sauce off of my fingers with a paper napkin. “Yeah. My father’s just relieved to hear that the studio’s going to pay for it. He was afraid he’d get stuck paying for two weddings at once.”
Jerry stood up and pushed in his chair. “I’ll be right back,” he said.
I frowned, watching him walk back toward the bathroom. Most of his pizza was still on his plate.
“So are you guys going to have a big wedding?” asked Carl.
“We haven’t really talked about it yet. It’s already overcomplicated, between Madison’s crazy schedule and my father’s work schedule—he travels a lot. Plus my stepfather might need knee surgery. We’ll get it figured out. Did you guys have a big wedding?”
“Catholic,” said Carl.
“Oh, that says it all, doesn’t it?”
“And my family’s Jewish,” he added. “Up until the day before, we weren’t even sure which relatives would refuse to come. In the end, they all came. It was pretty uncomfortable, though.”
“Yeah, we have a situation kind of like that. You can’t put my parents in the same room together. My mom still refers to my stepmother as a floozy, and she and my dad have been divorced almost twenty years. The hardest part is that I like my stepmother, and that hurts my mother’s feelings. But I’d hate to ignore her just because my mom’s around. And the invitations—I can’t even think about it. If my stepmother’s name is on them, my mom will cry and make me feel horrible forever.”
We talked weddings for a little while longer, filling the time while Jerry was in the bathroom. Eventually he came back to the table, making his way slowly through the noisy crowd.
“You okay?” I asked as he sat back down beside me. He still looked drained.
“Yeah.”
“We were just talking about weddings,” Antonia told him.
“Take my advice, buddy,” said Carl. “Try to keep it small. The more people you have to keep track of, the less you notice that you actually got married.”
“Yeah,” Jerry said again.
“Have you picked out a church, at least?” asked Antonia.
“It looks like we’ll be going to Jerry’s. He’s the more religious of the two of us. I mean, we’re really about the same, but he’s the one who’s more intent on getting to church on Sunday. So it’ll probably be Presbyterian.” I nudged him with my elbow again. “You’re not eating.”
“I’m not all that hungry.”
Antonia reached for a second slice of pizza. “What are you?”
“Methodist. That’s what my mom is. My dad’s nothing. I think he was brought up Congregationalist and he didn’t like it, so he just dropped the whole subject.”
“What about Madison? She sure doesn’t seem like a Methodist on TV.”
I smiled. “She’s something. I think she’s a Baptist at heart. She believes in new beginnings.”
The whole way home, Jerry was quiet. He let me pick the radio station and didn’t say a word about it, not even when a Fleetwood Mac song came on that usually sent him scrambling for the buttons. After an uncomfortable long moment, I changed the station myself. Silence stretched thin between us; Jerry went through a yellow light, doing his usual routine of kissing two fingers and touching them to the car ceiling, but listlessly.
“What’s the matter, Jerry?” I asked, more statement than question.
“Nothing. Dinner just didn’t agree with me.”
“You looked like you’d been throwing up.”
“It’s not a big deal. Remember who you’re talking to. Throwing up’s second nature to me.”
“Well, I’m sorry you didn’t have a better evening.”
He shook his head. “Nothing to be sorry about. I was with you, right? And you know I’m crazy about you.”
I glanced at him out of
the corner of my eye. “Thanks.”
“Head to toe. Man, I wish I’d met you ten years ago. Can you imagine? We’d probably have a whole bunch of kids by now. ‘Course, ten years ago I was still an idiot, but if I’d had someone to straighten out for, I would have done it. I know I would.”
Under normal circumstances I would have been giggling from the flattery, but something was wrong here, and it felt creepy. A chill was creeping up through my fingers, and I felt relieved when we turned onto Jerry’s street and he pulled into the driveway.
“Pretty sweet of you to say that,” I said.
“My pleasure.” He pulled his car door open and stepped out without making eye contact. “I thought you should know.”
Jerry unlocked the door, and we slowly climbed the stairs to our room. He took off his watch and set it on the night table, then set his wallet beside it.
“You’re not too tired, are you?” he asked. He threw me a tepid smile.
“I don’t know.” I leaned against the wall and folded my arms in front of me. “What was it that set you off?”
“What do you mean?”
“I think you know. You started getting weird as soon as we started talking about Rhett and the whole wedding thing. Are you afraid to get married? Is that it?”
He chuckled. “Hell, no. I can’t wait to get married.”
“Did it bug you when Antonia called him a drunk?”
“No. Sit in on an AA meeting sometime and you’ll hear a whole lot worse than that. It doesn’t bother me in the least.”
I nodded. Two things had become clear: one, that there was something he wasn’t telling me, and two, that he wasn’t going to volunteer the information. He started cleaning out his pockets into the bowl on the dresser, looking guilty as anything. My anger had already reached a slow simmer. I didn’t like having to pry things out of my fiancé.
“Then what is it, Jerry?” I demanded. “And don’t try to tell me it was the pizza. I’m not an idiot.”
“I never said you were an idiot. I think you’re brilliant.”
“Jerry.”
He turned to face me and stuck his hands into the back pockets of his jeans, scrunching his shoulders up a bit, then leaned back against the dresser.
“Soliciting a prostitute,” he said.
I felt something like a hand squeezing my throat from the inside. “What?”
“Yeah. I got arrested for that once, too. Well, I thought she was a prostitute. But it turned out she was actually a police officer.” He tried to smile, but it turned into a wince. “Story of my life, huh? No intuition about women.”
I just stared at him. I was afraid I was going to throw up. “You?”
He looked toward the window. “It’s not on my record, though. They do this deal where they let you go through a sensitivity class in exchange for them dropping the charges. Otherwise—” He laughed humorlessly. “Otherwise I would have had a hell of a time keeping my job.”
Mentally, I put together the fact that this couldn’t have been some stupid thing he’d done in college—something we could both blame on the booze, the pre-accident past life he was so proud to have left behind. I closed my eyes. “When did this happen?”
“The arrest, or the sensitivity class?”
“The arrest.”
The muscles in his jaw tensed. “July.”
“July?”
“Look, I screwed up. I took responsibility. I did my—”
“That was like a month before I met you!”
“Well, it was almost three months, really. Because I got arrested at the beginning of July, and then you didn’t actually let me meet you until, like, practically October, and I did the class a week or two later, before we were really an item, so—”
I dug my fingers into the bedspread. “You’re not going to get out of this by shooting off a bunch of technicalities about the time frame, Jerry. You should have told me. You should have said something a long time ago.”
He raised his eyebrows so high his forehead crinkled all the way to his hairline. “I’m just telling you how it happened. By the time you got done deciding between me and the dog guy, I’d already put it all behind me.”
Raising my voice a level, I added, “And you aren’t going to turn this around by dragging Carter into it.”
“I’m not. I’m not. You do realize I didn’t actually do anything, right, back in July? I didn’t actually see a prostitute. All I saw was—well, a cop.”
“But you were trying to get a prostitute to have sex with you.”
“No, I wasn’t. I mean, not intercourse. I wouldn’t do that, Phoebe. Does that sound like the kind of thing I’d do?”
His eyes looked panicked, but I stared him down. “You’re telling me you tried to get a blow job from a hooker. And you didn’t think this was something I needed to know about you.”
He threw his arms out wildly. “Well, it’s not like that’s something I’d have any desire to do when I’m with you, so, no, I didn’t think you needed to know it. You don’t have any idea what it’s like, Phoebe. You’ve never been in a sexual relationship and then tried to be abstinent for years after it’s over. You get a little pent-up after a while.”
I swung my feet over the side of the bed, feeling the sudden coldness of the hardwood floor beneath them. “It doesn’t sound like it’s the only time you did it, either.”
He looked away again, and I grabbed my pillow from the bed. “Tell me how many times you’ve done this, Jerry.”
“I don’t know.” His voice sounded weary. “A few.”
“How many is a few?”
“Three or four.”
“Is that counting the cop?”
“No.”
I glared at him and stepped toward the doorway. “So—the night you gave me that whole line about not wanting to be too pushy, when you asked me to spend the night—did it feel special to you because you saved forty bucks?”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Hey. That’s not fair.”
I could see his anger stirring, but I didn’t care at all. In fact, I wanted to get his temper going, set off a good screaming match, whatever it would take to put an end to him acting weak and whiny and defensive. “How could you do that?” I shouted at him. “How could you just ask some random stranger to do that for you?”
“I didn’t think I was ever going to settle down with anybody!” he yelled back, and for a moment the savage edge to his voice almost made me cringe. “I thought I was going to be alone for the rest of my life. I wasn’t sitting there getting blown and thinking, gee, I wonder if this is going to piss off my future wife?”
“And it also never crossed your mind that your future wife might want to know you’ve been arrested?”
His face was turning a dark shade of pink. “Sure, it crossed my mind. And so did the fact that if I came clean about it, I wouldn’t have a future wife anymore.”
“So you decided to lie about it.”
“I didn’t lie, Phoebe. Sheesh, it’s not like you dug this one up on your own. And I knew you’d go off like this, which is a lot of why I didn’t want to tell you.”
“Yeah, okay,” I replied, hearing the shakiness in my own voice. “So you just hoped you’d manage to pass yourself off forever as the nice religious guy who doesn’t let sex run his life?”
He laughed, surprising me. “To be who you wanted, because I wanted you? Yeah. And you’re one to talk about passing yourself off for that kind of reason. Karen.”
One of the cats darted between us and down the stairs. I turned and followed it, the shadows leaping around me as I hurried down to the living room. The sofa where I’d snuggled with Jerry in front of the TV, warm beneath the fleece blanket, didn’t look nearly as welcoming as it did on our movie nights. But it would have to do.
“Phoebe, come back up,” he called, his voice pleading but tired. “I’m sorry, okay? Come on up and let’s try to get this worked out.”
I threw my pillow on the sofa and plunked myself
down, swallowing against the lump in my throat. I knew if I came back upstairs, he’d grovel and apologize, praise me for my virtues and beg my forgiveness, all mixed in with urgent coaxing to make love. For all my anger, his efforts would probably work, and this was a matter too serious to allow him that opportunity. So I pulled the blanket up to my chin and closed my eyes, my hearing tuned to the room’s hollow silence, both hoping for and dreading his footsteps on the stairs. But he didn’t come down. He was considerate enough to take me seriously and give me my space. And that only made things even harder.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I woke up early from the light coming in through the big living-room windows, groggy and sleepless, my mouth feeling fuzzy from not brushing my teeth the night before. My mind had that nauseated, hung-over feeling that you wake up with when something terrible has happened the night before, something irreconcilable with no resolution in sight. I sat up, looking over the orderly living room and the cats asleep on the armchair and windowsill. Already I was homesick for the bed with Jerry, the warmth of his body and his hand on my waist, the murmuring conversations about dreams and the quality of our sleep. I sighed and got off the sofa, my muscles stiff and sore, the cats milling around my heels in anticipation of breakfast. A few minutes after I started the coffeemaker, he came downstairs, dressed for work in khakis and a red-pinstriped shirt and looking like he’d been out partying all night.
“Good morning,” he mumbled.
I took a yogurt from the fridge and said nothing back. Standing at the counter with his back to me, in his neat professional clothes and conservatively short hair, he looked as clean-cut as ever, yet somehow different in a sinister sort of way. His body under those clothes seemed hungry and unknowable, full of passions that I couldn’t understand. My mind threw out an image of him looking just like this in the front seat of his Jetta, in his button-down shirt and pleated khakis and leather belt, his head back against the headrest, unzipping his pants, pulling them open. I could picture it exactly. He poured a cup of coffee, and I imagined his hand buried in the teased-up, permed blond hair of whoever had been doing it for him. That was probably right, too.
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