The pot on the stove is starting to boil, and Harmony adjusts the knob down to simmer. She rifles through a drawer, seemingly as familiar with their kitchen as he is, and digs out a wooden spoon. “I should have waited before I let myself in. I think I scared Olive.”
“I wasn’t scared,” Olive objects, her voice polite but strained. “Just surprised. Dad didn’t tell me you had a key.”
“I don’t,” Harmony says as Jonathan chimes in: “She knows where we keep the hidden key.”
“Oh.” Olive takes a green banana from the top of a grocery bag and unpeels it, avoiding both of their gazes. He’s momentarily frustrated with his daughter. She’s usually so sweet and considerate; what’s her issue with Harmony, of all people?
“You know what?” he says. “Harmony, you should have a key. I’ll get you one. You’re practically part of the family.”
Harmony flashes a grin at Jonathan, then turns back to busy herself at the stove.
“I was just asking Olive if she’d be interested in having a girls’ day sometime soon,” she says as she stirs her soup. “Get pedicures, go shopping, facials, you know.” She glances over her shoulder and smiles at Olive, who in turn takes a giant bite of banana and glances questioningly at Jonathan, as if asking for permission to pass on this female bonding. Jonathan raises his eyebrows in encouragement. Olive looks at him for a long minute and then turns back and gives Harmony a tiny nod of acquiescence with a beleaguered smile. Jonathan feels a pang of affection for them both: for Olive, who, as long as he has known her, has never painted her toenails; and for Harmony, who is trying so very hard to befriend his daughter.
Harmony points the wooden spoon at Olive. “Ball’s in your court. Just let me know a good day.”
“Yeah, I’ll do that,” Olive says quickly, and Jonathan sighs, knowing she never will. Teenagers are like skittish forest creatures that dance away at your approach, snarl if you dare to confront them head-on. You need to wait, patiently, for them to come to you; though odds are they never will.
Olive shoves the banana peel in the trash can and then looks back at Jonathan. “Dad. I’ve got tons of homework tonight….”
“We’ll call you down when dinner’s ready.”
She disappears out of the room. Jonathan wanders over to the stove and peers over Harmony’s shoulder. “Is that a turnip?”
“Jerusalem artichoke.” She twists around to look at the door. “Olive’s just patronizing me, isn’t she? Maybe I should have suggested something besides pedicures. What do you think she’d want to do?”
“Plant trees? Go to a fracking protest? Read aloud BuzzFeed stories about beached walruses?” He shrugs. “Don’t worry. It won’t kill Olive to give something frivolous a try for once.” He opens a bottle of wine, then settles in to watch Harmony cook. She is sloppy, enthusiastic, voracious, food flying in every direction, one finger constantly in her mouth. He can recall Billie at the stove, much more intense and focused—she was a good cook, her Bon Appetits always heavily marked up with sticky tabs, the resulting dishes always photo-ready—but also somehow dutiful about food where Harmony is passionate.
He slides a wineglass across the island to Harmony. “I have a delicate question for you,” he says.
Harmony pauses from her cooking, the wineglass at her lips. “About what?”
“Was Billie having an affair?”
Harmony slowly lowers the glass of wine and wipes a bead of sweat from her hairline. “An affair? Why would you think that?”
He hesitates, aware that he’s about to tarnish Harmony’s own memories of her friend. “Well. It turns out Billie lied to me a few times. She told me she was off hiking with Rita for the weekend, but Rita just informed me that she wasn’t with her.”
“Really?” Something sharp and fleeting passes across Harmony’s face, her focus drawing abruptly inward. Then she shakes her head. “I’m sure it’s nothing; she was probably just off hiking by herself. You know Billie, she could be like that sometimes, off in her own world and not particularly worried about what other people might think.”
This should be reassuring, but it’s not. If Billie was lying to him, who’s to say she wasn’t lying to Harmony, too? “But did you ever notice that she was acting oddly right before she died?”
Harmony’s whole body goes tense. She turns back to the stove, fiddling with the temperature of the burners. “Well, yeah.” Her back is to him as she tosses generous handfuls of something green into the soup. “But you know why, right?” She turns around to face him and lowers her voice to a whisper: “What happened with us. Back then.”
And there it is, finally unearthed from the coffin in which the subject has been buried for the last year. The Thing That Neither of Them Has Wanted to Talk About.
When had he first noticed it, the way Harmony lingered in their house even when Billie and Sean weren’t there? Really, it was there from the very beginning: the way Harmony stood slightly too close to him whenever they chatted, the way the heat of her seemed to trigger something chemical in him. The four of them would be on a double date, Sean and Billie caught up in some heated debate, when Harmony’s blue eyes would lift to meet Jonathan’s and he would feel a mix of profound discomfort and giddy shock, as if they shared a secret that he did not at all intend to convey.
But there was something so fecund and female about Harmony, all soft hair and curves. And while Billie was more beautiful—she had a sharper, glittery edge—they were years into their marriage. They were parents together. Heady sexual desire had faded out long ago: For years now their sex life had been about the comfortable quick release, familiarity breeding a definite pleasurable ease but also failing to offer any real thrilling highs. And in those days, with Jonathan’s late-night work schedule and Billie’s early-morning sports regimen, their schedules never overlapped anyway. How was sex supposed to fit into that?
Still, he would have gone on forever, ignoring this vague attraction to Harmony. It wasn’t like he was ever going to do anything about it. Other opportunities for infidelity had presented themselves throughout the years—Claremont Moms, four G&Ts in at the spring fundraiser, who let their hands linger too long on his forearm; women at his gym who met his eyes in the mirror and didn’t let go—and while it was always flattering, even a little titillating, it certainly didn’t seem worth blowing up his marriage over. He adored his wife and kid. He liked being a paragon of husbandly virtue. He had the life he’d always wanted, and he wasn’t about to screw that up.
About seven months before Billie’s accident, Harmony and Sean suddenly broke up, and for a long time after that, Harmony vanished from their lives. “I think she’s licking her wounds,” Billie said, shrugging, when Jonathan asked. “Feeling vulnerable. Probably a little embarrassed for sticking with Sean so long when anyone could see he was so ambivalent about her. I mean, you saw how he used to flirt with me.” Jonathan didn’t spend too much time thinking about this; Harmony’s absence was, frankly, a bit of a relief, as if he’d been trapped inside a pressure cooker and someone had lifted the lid.
But then in early September, two days after the late-night argument with Billie about quitting his job, Billie had gone off for the weekend, hiking Mount Shasta with Rita. Olive was at a sleepover birthday party at her friend Ming’s house, leaving Jonathan at home alone on Saturday night, doing battle with a Decode editorial about the future of bitcoin while polishing off the better part of a six-pack.
By the time the doorbell rang, he was already half drunk. Maybe that’s the reason why, when he realized that Harmony was at the door, he didn’t follow his better instincts. Or maybe he was annoyed with Billie and following some subconscious self-destructive urge. Either way, when he saw Harmony there, clutching her cellphone in her fist, he opened the door wider instead of turning her away like he should have.
“Hey! This is a surprise,” he said, hearing a note of excessive enthusiasm in his voice. “You looking for Billie? Because she’s off hiking this weekend.”
He hesitated only briefly. “Well, I’m here. And I’m pretty sure there’s a bottle of wine in the fridge.”
Two hours later, the bottle of wine was gone, along with most of a second. Jonathan found himself sitting on the couch with Harmony, listening to her talk about the breakup with Sean, the struggle to find a new apartment, the monthlong forgiveness-centered meditation retreat in Sedona from which she’d just returned. “I needed to find my emotional center again, let go of all that toxic anger. I was feeling so”—she lifted a hand and made a jittery motion with it—“unbalanced.” She dropped the hand abruptly and then glanced at him sideways. “Sean cheated on me, did you know that?”
He sat up. “Seriously? I had no idea. What an idiot.”
She looked at him for a long time, her translucent eyes studying his. Finally, she threw herself back on the throw pillows and sighed. “He already has a new girlfriend, too, some grad student who’s half my age. And I’m stuck online-dating. Getting on Tinder now that I’m over forty, it’s just laughable,” she said. Her bare feet rubbed up against each other, little round toes painted a metallic cerulean. Her blond hair, loosened from its braids, billowed out in shiny waves behind her. “It doesn’t matter what you look like or how interesting you are, once there’s a four in front of your age, you’re basically invisible.”
“I can’t imagine you ever being invisible,” he said, his voice raspy.
She smiled blearily at him. “You’re so sweet. No, I need one of those online matchmaking dating sites. You know, ‘People Past Their Prime Dot Com.’ ‘People Who Need Help Because They Usually Date Losers Dot Com.’ ‘People Totally Ready to Settle Dot Com.’ ” She looked like she might cry.
He looked at her appraisingly—he couldn’t help it—and tried to imagine someone swiping left on her. It seemed unfathomable. “Come on, Harmony. Stop being so hard on yourself. You’re a beautiful woman.” Had he gone too far in saying this? He settled himself tighter into his corner of the couch as if erecting an invisible barrier of fortified air between them.
“Doesn’t matter, anyway. The good guys”—she lifted a wobbly finger to point at him—“the nice guys like you are already gone. Snapped up years ago. By the smart women who had foresight, the women who didn’t spend their twenties and thirties thinking, Well, maybe the next one will be better, only to discover that with each passing day the men get a little bit worse.”
“Jesus, Harmony.” He was shocked to hear that coming out of her mouth. He flailed desperately for something, anything, that might take the uncomfortable sting out of her words. “You’re going to meet someone eventually. Anyway, I’m not that great. I’m sure Billie has told you about my many, many flaws. The workaholism, the obliviousness, the risk aversion.”
“Oh, please.”
“Seriously. Billie thinks I should quit my job and do something more creative and adventurous, and instead I make a million excuses to avoid it because I’m scared of failing. You must have heard about that.” He realized that a certain bitterness was creeping into his voice, and he laughed to counterbalance it.
Harmony stretched her legs out on the couch so that her toes were inches away from his thigh. “Billie doesn’t tell me everything.”
“C’mon, I see how you guys talk, always whispering to each other.” He took a long drink. “Plus, the two of you have all that shared history.”
“History. Yeah, we have a lot of that.” Harmony gave a curious laugh and fiddled with her wineglass. “Our relationship—it’s complicated. You know, back in Oregon I used to think she just tolerated me. Maybe she still does. Maybe she keeps me close now because I know too many of her secrets.”
“Secrets?” He laughed at this, imagining internecine Claremont Mom drama from which he’d been thankfully excluded. “Anyway. I’m sure that’s not true. You’re her best friend.”
“You know what Billie’s like,” she continued, a flush stealing up her cheeks. “You spend all this time with her, talking, and you feel like you’re getting in there; and then when you walk away, you realize she hasn’t told you anything real about herself at all. She’s mostly just reflected you back at yourself. What you most want to see.”
Jonathan felt an unexpected, unpleasant jolt of recognition. They looked at each other from opposite ends of the couch, and he felt Harmony’s toe making electric contact with his thigh. It was excruciating. A red alert was going off in his head—bad idea bad idea—and he began to shift himself up and off the couch, far away from her, when all of a sudden she was right there, pressing against him, her tongue in his mouth.
Kissing her was a full-body rush unlike anything he’d felt since he and Billie first started dating. He’d almost forgotten this kind of primitive joy, the pleasure of kissing someone new, your body primed and loose with alcohol. For a few critical seconds—a half minute?—he forgot himself entirely in the surprise of it all, the flat-out decadence of desire, his tongue tangling with hers; and then his conscience battled valiantly back, triumphing over primal lust.
He jerked away. “Stop!” The room was spinning, and the reality of what had just happened gripped him hard. “I can’t…sorry…” He recoiled and then scrambled across the living room toward the powder room in the hallway. There he pressed his face against the sobering porcelain of the toilet and threw up the hamburger he’d eaten for dinner. Afterward he washed his face in cold water and stared at himself in the mirror, horrified. You stopped in time, he told himself. She kissed you. You didn’t do anything wrong. Still, there was no denying that he’d liked it, that he’d felt tempted, and this felt almost as bad as infidelity itself. He could see himself teetering on a precipice: divorce, a custody battle, Olive’s tears; the lonely nights with a bottle of bourbon in a bachelor pad in a generic high-rise apartment building; the spare bedroom made up for Olive but mostly standing empty. I don’t want that, he thought. I love my family more than anything else.
When he came back out, Harmony was sitting in the corner of the couch with a pillow clutched to her chest. He sat down in an armchair safely on the other side of the room.
“I’m not going to lie and say I’m not attracted to you,” he said. “But I’m married. I love Billie. I don’t want to do anything that would hurt her.”
She nodded and looked like she might burst into tears. There was a smudge of mascara under her left eye, pink gloss smeared outside the lines of her lip.
He wanted to go over and give her a hug but knew better. “I hope we can still be friends,” he continued. “And I hope this doesn’t damage your friendship with Billie, either, if that’s possible. I’d hate to drive a wedge between you.”
“Sure.” Harmony’s voice had gone flat, and he wasn’t sure who she was upset with: Him? Billie? Herself? They sat in silence for a few minutes until Harmony finally stood up and straightened her shirt. “Look, this was totally my fault. I don’t know what I was thinking. Whatever you do, don’t blame yourself.” She walked to the door and then hesitated, turning back to study him. “Billie doesn’t deserve you,” she said, and then left before he could respond.
When Billie returned that Sunday, he said nothing about what had happened. What would that accomplish? And yet he couldn’t help sensing that something in his behavior had shifted: He had a secret from his wife, and it felt like a sharp stone lying at the bottom of every interaction, every benign kitchen-sink exchange. It had to be glaringly obvious to Billie that something was different. And despite Harmony’s reassurances, he did blame himself. Surely Harmony wouldn’t have kissed him if he hadn’t given her reason to think it would be reciprocated?
He wasn’t sure what to do. The impulse to make it up to his wife with flowers and expensive gifts and orgasms was a clear giveaway of his guilt
, but neither did he want to avoid her by burying himself in his work, because wasn’t that part of her problem with him in the first place? Nothing he did felt natural anymore. Instead, he felt like an imposter; the gnawing ache of his guilt and self-recrimination was as painful as an ulcer, eating him alive.
At last he couldn’t take it anymore. He came into the bedroom one night and found Billie sitting in bed, reading a novel. He sat cross-legged on the edge of the mattress, staring at her: the soft furrow of her brow, the fine lines around her wide-set eyes, the first strands of gray in her hair, all the result of the care and attention and stress that went into raising their family. His beautiful wife, his partner for so long. He’d let her down.
“I need to talk to you about something,” he said.
She looked up at him, startled, her dark eyes fiery with some undefinable emotion. Fear? She folded the page over carefully and closed her book. “Go on,” she said.
“Harmony and I kissed,” he said, his voice croaking. And it was almost a relief, the way all that pent-up guilt came flooding out of him, the release of an opening valve.
Billie pushed herself upright on the pillow. She tilted her head, puzzling this. “You. Kissed. Harmony?” He waited for something else—recrimination, tears—but she just studied his face. Was this a test?
The words began to pour out of him. “It was a huge mistake. And I know it’s no excuse, but we were both drunk, it was while you were off hiking with Rita,” he said. “And I stopped it before anything really happened. There was no—”
“Sex?” she interrupted sharply, not looking at him.
“No. Just a kiss. The whole thing lasted a minute, tops. And look, I know that’s still bad, and I don’t blame you for being furious—” He strangled, running out of words.
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