by Ann Packer
He hesitated. “Is it OK?”
He looked more put together than the other time—shaven, less hollow eyed. He wore a red plaid scarf around his neck.
“I got your message,” she said.
He inhaled and lifted his shoulders, then sighed and let them drop. Nothing would happen: she decided it in that moment. Knew it. Decided it.
“I’m going to have some tea,” she said. “Mint. Would you like some?”
“Please.”
She led the way into the kitchen. There were dirty dishes on the counter, two pieces of apple browning on a cutting board. She took her kettle and filled it, then set it back on the stove. “Hang on a sec,” she said, and she moved past him through the doorway, to the stuff on the living room floor. She picked up the two mugs and brought them back into the kitchen. She turned the water back on, waited for it to get hot, and then washed them thoroughly. She faced him.
“Have you cheated on her before?”
At once he shook his head. Then he put his fingers over his mouth and said, “Sort of.”
“How do you sort of cheat? Does it depend on the meaning of the word ‘is’?”
He half smiled. “She knew about it.”
“She gave you permission?”
“It was more a matter of looking the other way.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s none of my business.” She got out the tea bags, tagless little paper squares. She dropped one in each mug.
He was standing in the middle of the room, his coat still buttoned, his lips pale and chapped. He unbuttoned his coat, loosened the plaid scarf. He went and leaned against the wall. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“You live alone here. It doesn’t seem like you date. I’m just wondering—” He broke off talking and shrugged. “I mean…”
“You’re wondering what I do for sex?”
He barked out a laugh but didn’t correct her.
The kettle began to whistle, and she turned around and switched off the gas. She thought of the dreams of his naked body, of his hands all over her, that had gripped her for at least a week. She faced him again. “I have a vibrator.”
His cheeks reddened a little. “And that works for you?”
“Not that well. I haven’t figured out how to program it to say it loves me.”
He smiled, but after a moment he moved to the table and sat down and put his face in his hands.
She filled the mugs with water and brought them over, set one near his elbow. Taking the chair opposite his, she said, “I did it for over a year. Guy with two kids.”
He looked up. “And a wife?”
“And a dog and a cat and a hamster.”
“Really?”
“I think they had a goldfish.”
He lifted his mug. “I guess it wasn’t a good idea, huh?”
“Not for me.”
He blew into his tea and sipped noisily, then put the mug down and rested his chin in his hand. He looked closely at her, and she saw creases bracketing his mouth, the way his cheekbones jutted out under his eyes. It came to her that she didn’t know what his face looked like, not really.
He held out his free hand, and she put hers in it. “What’s she like?” she said.
“Which one?”
“Either.”
He thought for a moment. “She’s wiggly. And sticky. And when I give her a cookie she makes this excited little squeak, like a monkey.”
“I assume this is Maud.”
They both smiled. After a moment he squeezed her hand and let go. He picked up his tea and blew into it again.
“Are you guys talking?”
“Mary and me? Sure, about diapers. And soy milk, and blackout shades.” He took a sip of tea. “Actually, that’s not true. But it’s hard to have much of a conversation about how freaked out I am. I mean, who has time?”
Sarabeth thought of the years when Lauren and Joe were young, how she’d almost lost Liz then—had felt, many times, that she had lost her. But then she’d miraculously call at a time when the kids were sleeping, or at preschool, and Liz would say, “Oh, thank God, I’ve been dying to talk to someone who doesn’t need something from me.”
Had she lost Liz now?
She looked at Mark again, his big hands wrapping the mug. She said, “What did you talk about before?”
“Nothing,” he said with a shrug. “Everything.”
She blew into her tea. Steam still rose from the surface, and she wondered how he’d been able to drink his. She brought her mug close to her mouth and just held it there, letting the warmth bathe her upper lip.
“Mark?” she said.
“Don’t tell me it’ll be OK.”
She didn’t. Instead, she looked at his hands, at the bones of his wrists. She imagined a life of talking about nothing and everything: a consummation—how did it go? A consummation devoutly to be wished.
With a sheepish smile, he dug into his jeans pocket and tossed something onto the table. It was a condom. She put her mug down and reached for it. After a moment she opened the package and pulled the condom out. She brought it to her nose, and it smelled like plastic, which it was. She and Billy had used condoms, condoms and her diaphragm simultaneously. No risks. She remembered a time when she tried to roll the condom off him, during sex; she just wanted to feel him inside her, no latex between them, just once. She’d just finished her period, which he knew. But he pulled out and rolled off her right away, then sat up and said in a voice so firm it scared her, No.
Mark took the condom from her. He pinched the tip and unrolled it little by little. When it was open he laid it on the table between them. It was odd to see one open on a table, the blousy shape, the thinness. After a moment, he turned it so the tip was facing her. “Pow,” he said.
They talked a little more, and then she saw him out and cleaned the kitchen and got into bed. It was very cold. She thought of getting a heating pad, but she knew her body would warm the sheets after a while—slowly, the way a single body did. Everyone was in bed now: Jim with Donald, Liz across the bay with Brody, Mark with Mary. She didn’t know what to do with it, how she could see bodies in beds and how she was one. It was dizzying to go up and down like this: others as if from far above, and herself here. She saw a pool of light on the couples, light in the spaces between them, the spaces they defined by lying together. It was in a light like that that she wanted to live. With Billy the light hadn’t fully existed because she’d been unable to keep it with her when she was alone. Or it had existed, but it was a false light, light like a false spring, flowers blooming too early and doomed to die. She thought her mother had been a flower sort of like that, a flower that lacked the support of a stem: all blossom, already browning at the edges.
When the weak December sun woke her eight hours later, she was thinking this again, seeing it: tender petals tinged by their unhappy fate, evident if you looked. She lay in bed, and her room—her life—seemed a place she had wandered into by accident. Bedroom to bedroom, dust to dust. On Cowper Street there must have been a time when her parents had lived together in a pool of light, but she could not remember it. Always, they had been separate, and she separate from them. And yet this morning she had a feeling of some other story than the one she knew. What if she could find it and furnish it with happy times? What would she put in it? Her mother and herself, on the floor with blocks, building and laughing. Her parents holding hands on the living room couch. Her father taking her to the park while her mother stayed home and happily cooked the family’s favorite dinner. She could invent all kinds of things, and once invented they could take on substance, mass; they could go head to head with what she knew. Which, then, would be more real? Her mother and herself on the floor with blocks, building and laughing: could she say absolutely that it hadn’t happened? Her eyes welled, streamed. She lay in bed, got up, ate, returned to bed. Minutes turned to hours. Still she stayed in bed, while shadows moved across the floor, tracking the progress
of the day.
In the evening she got up. She went into her workroom and calmly began cutting bits of scrap paper into squares. Last year she had done nearly this, made tiny books as gifts. Tonight she was on to a lampshade. “Patchwork,” she would call it. On a white background she glued the squares: some were translucent, some were opaque; some of the colors were pale, some were dark, some were bright. What she liked was the way they looked together, how each was its own but also part of what they all were together. In randomness there lay a secret order, or so it was sometimes nice to think. She left the work to dry, ate bread and fruit, got back into bed. She slept fitfully, waking to images of Lorelei and herself, of Liz and Lauren, of Mary and Maud. The men were standing against the walls of her bedroom, guarding her. Rick Heidt was there, too.
In the morning she took a bath, lifting one leg and then the other to shave away the long wiry hairs of winter. She sank under the water, lifted her head, and thought fleetingly of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, bursting from the bath, a woman who had been stirred, whisked, beaten to a frenzy. By passion, by desperation.
She got out of the tub, dressed, went into the kitchen. Why the same thing every day, why tea and then coffee? She wanted cherry cider; she didn’t know why.
She bundled up and left the house, out for the first time since Tuesday. It was Thursday now, and the world was as busy as ever—busier, because Christmas was just three days away. Andronico’s was mobbed with couples and families, everyone pushing carts loaded with food. She collected cherry cider, out-of-season asparagus, and a miniature key lime pie. She didn’t even need a basket.
Her hair was still wet, and as she walked home she felt her toes going numb from the cold. What would she do when she got back—drink cider, peel asparagus, return to the patchwork lampshade? Something she’d possessed earlier was gone again now.
She was panting lightly when she got home, her breath just visible in the cold air. The Volvo was gone. Up the empty driveway she walked, into her house, into her kitchen. She thought to check for messages, thought she hadn’t been gone that long, lifted the handset anyway. To her surprise, the stutter tone. She realized she wanted a message from Mark, and she put the handset back in the cradle. But she couldn’t live this way.
She lifted the handset again and got to her voice mail, and the voice said, “Sent. Tuesday. At nine-seventeen p. m.” Tuesday? she thought, but then there was no more time to think because Liz’s voice was saying: “Are you there? It’s me—Liz. Sarabeth? Are you there?” There was a pause, and then she said, “I miss you. Call me.” And standing in her kitchen, Sarabeth burst into a thousand pieces of bliss that rained lightly and colorfully onto the floor.
part three
27
It was so foggy on the freeway that Liz stayed in the slow lane, heart hammering, wondering if it had been a mistake to go out. She couldn’t see anything but the road just ahead, and she flinched whenever a pair of headlights loomed up behind her. She began watching for exits, for a way down out of the hills, down to the streets of Hillsborough or Millbrae, where she would be able to see houses and find a safe way home. She would not take such an exit, but she watched anyway.
It was the first week of January, and she was on her way to have dinner with Sarabeth. They had talked a few times over the holidays, and for quite a while once Liz was back from Tahoe, but they hadn’t seen each other since…since. Liz was eager to get things back to normal.
The fog lifted as she approached Colma, and she sped up, feeling for a moment that she could leave her fear behind, though of course the feeling of it stayed with her, beating through her bloodstream. Again, the thought that she should have stayed home. How did agoraphobia start? She had begun thinking differently—or maybe just more—about mental problems. What defined paranoia? Or obsessive-compulsive disorder? She could not go to bed until the kitchen was spotless.
In the city, she parked in her usual garage and walked the three long blocks to the Thai place. She passed people slouched in doorways holding signs that asked for money. There were times when the truths of the world—its reports on the multitude of ways there were to suffer—pressed in so hard that she felt she couldn’t bear it. What did it mean that she did bear it? What was the wall inside her made of that it kept such truths away?
At the restaurant she was seated and ordered wine. She hoped it would be OK, seeing Sarabeth. Their phone conversations had had a strained feeling. Would seeing her feel strained, too? The part of Liz that hated the fog, that hated the way she feared the fog, hated this, too.
The door opened and Sarabeth rushed in. Evidently it had begun to rain; Liz watched as she struggled to close an umbrella, head bent to the task, though Liz also had the impression that she was hiding.
At last she looked up. Her face was tiny and white, her hair curling wildly around it. As she searched for Liz, she bit her lip.
Liz raised her hand, and Sarabeth saw her.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, rushing over. “I couldn’t park.”
“You’re not late.” Liz stood, and they both hesitated for a moment before they hugged. Sarabeth felt thin, but it was hard to be sure—she pulled away quickly.
She shrugged off her coat and then, avoiding Liz’s eyes, looked over at the hostess stand. “Duh,” she said, and she carried the coat away.
She was thin, and when she came back, Liz saw that there were dark crescents under her eyes.
“Sit,” Liz said.
Sarabeth pulled out her chair and sat. She said, “So how’s it been so far? School, I mean.”
Today had been Lauren’s third day back, and as on the first two she had moved slowly and reluctantly through the familiar morning rituals of getting ready. On the other hand, each afternoon she’d seemed easier than the previous, and tonight, as Liz was getting ready to leave, she even complained a little about her homework. Liz took it as a good sign that she would mention school at all.
“You know, I’m not sure,” Liz said. “I can’t really tell. And I can’t imagine ever trusting my judgment again anyway, so—” She shrugged and reached for her wineglass.
“You will,” Sarabeth said.
“What?”
“Trust your judgment again.”
“No, I won’t!” Liz had spoken more emphatically than she’d intended, but this was the truth: she would never have full confidence in herself again.
Sarabeth looked alarmed, and Liz knew she should say something, but what? This was exactly how she’d felt on the phone. She had a script in front of her, but she couldn’t quite read it. Couldn’t speak it.
The waitress approached, and for a while there was business to occupy them: Sarabeth’s wine order and then the question of whether or not to order dinner now, too. Liz hoped they would, then swallowed the wish when Sarabeth told the waitress they needed more time.
“How are you?” Sarabeth said when the woman was gone.
“How are you?”
Sarabeth’s eyes filled, and Liz felt bad; she’d sounded testy, turning the question around without answering it. Why couldn’t she be a nice, reasonable person? She leaned forward and said, “Really, how are you? You look thin, have you been eating?”
“I’m fine,” Sarabeth said. “Tell me more about Lauren. Was she OK about therapy Monday?”
At Tahoe, Lauren had said she didn’t want to go back to Dr. Lewis, but on Monday morning she’d just nodded complacently when Liz reminded her she had an appointment after school.
“She was fine with it. It was kind of strange, really, given how adamant she was over Christmas.”
“Maybe she didn’t mean it.”
“Like it was a pro forma thing?”
“Or a test.”
Liz took a sip of wine and thought of Tahoe, how flat Lauren had seemed. On the phone Monday morning, returning Liz’s call, Dr. Lewis had suggested the flatness might have been Lauren’s strategy for coping with the time till school started again—anesthetizing herself because she was a
nxious. Which had made Liz feel it might have been a mistake to go to Tahoe in the first place. She remembered the first day up there, how she’d chosen not to ski and then spent the entire time worrying, puttering around the kitchen with her mother and Kelly when what she really wanted was to get to the slopes herself, hitchhike if she had to, to see how Lauren was. She’d skied the entire rest of the time, freezing, her legs killing her, but with Lauren never far away.
She looked at Sarabeth again. “Are you eating? I haven’t seen you this thin in a while.”
“I am now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Here she is,” Sarabeth said, and she looked up as the waitress arrived at their table.
By habit, Liz opened her menu. Appetizers, Soups, Curries, Noodles, Rice: she imagined ordering something different this time, pad thai, for example, or green curry beef. She looked up and saw that Sarabeth was waiting.
“The usual?” Sarabeth said, and after a moment Liz nodded.
When the waitress left, she fingered the base of her wineglass. What was happening at home right now? She reached into her purse and looked at the face of her phone, worried she might have missed a call. But it just said CINGULAR, as usual.
“What did you mean now you’re eating?” she said to Sarabeth. “When weren’t you?”
Sarabeth colored. “In December for a while.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Sarabeth.”
“Really, nothing.”
“Sarabeth.”
“It was no one thing,” Sarabeth said. “And anyway, I don’t want to—” She hesitated, and Liz reached across the table and touched her fingertips.
“Whatever it was.”
Sarabeth sighed and began telling a story about going to a play in Billy’s neighborhood, and something about the neighbor children, and a missed appointment with Jim, and then some reckless-sounding intrigue with Mark Murphy. As she spoke she seemed to relax, her face losing its drawn look, her voice lowering a little. Liz tried hard to stay focused. Whatever was happening at home right now, however Lauren was: Liz was here.