by Cate Holahan
Tyler murmurs again, more distinctly this time. He’s saying something. His eyes are half open, lit by the moon slipping through the cracked window.
“Hey, you.” I prop myself on my elbow and slide my naked torso up his side a couple inches.
“The sprinklers,” he moans.
I lift my head to peck his lips. My kiss lands on his neck.
“It must be midnight.” He scoots back toward the fabric headboard. “What time do you need to get back?”
My lips travel down his neck to his shoulder, licking the salt from his collarbone. I don’t want to go back. This room, this man—they exist outside of time and space. As long as I am within these walls, I am not a shamed wife with a waiting infant but a valued, vibrant, sexy woman. “Vicky is at my mom’s all night.”
“What about your husband?” He sits up straighter. My lips head for the triangle of his hip bones. “You’re not going to tell him?”
I sit on my haunches and lean back, flaunting my nakedness. My breasts are engorged to a cartoonish size on my lanky frame. This is the closest I will ever come to resembling a lingerie model without plastic surgery. I grab his hand and place it on my full chest. “I don’t want to talk about Jake.”
“But won’t he ask where you were if you don’t get home before him?”
I lean forward for a real kiss. He rolls to the side. His legs swing onto the floor. “This is serious.” He grabs his boxers off the hardwood and shoves a leg inside. “We have to talk about what you’ll tell him.”
I scoot back against the headboard and fold the sheet over my body. “I don’t know.”
“Are you thinking of confessing that you also cheated?”
I grimace. “If your marriage is over, is it cheating?”
“You’re still married.”
He pulls the boxers to his waist. The moon and the ambient light from the buildings outside highlight his muscular back as he bends down, searching for something. His clothes are in the closet. Is he looking for mine?
I rise from the mattress and stand in front of him, spotlighted by the window. “I’ll tell him the truth. I know he’s been cheating on me and I don’t know if I can forgive him. And . . .”
I reach for Tyler. He grasps my hand before it can land on his bare side. “And?”
I take a brave breath. “I’ve met someone.”
My hand falls as Tyler retreats from me, backtracking beyond the window’s direct light. “He’ll ask you who. He booked the appointment.” A charcoal filter obscures everything. I see the outline of Tyler’s body crouch to the ground and then rise as though he’s said a quick prayer. “He knows I was treating you. If you say my name, he’ll put two and two together. I could lose my license.”
The darkness prevents me from reading Tyler’s expression. Still, I can feel the intimacy in the room dissipate. On the bed, I was warm. Now I’m freezing in the air conditioning. Instinctually, my arms fold atop my chest. “I won’t say you. I’ll tell him it’s none of his business.”
“He won’t let you get away with that.”
“He’ll have to.”
“Beth. He’s a prosecutor. He’ll keep badgering you until you give him a name. He’ll be jealous. Angry. It won’t matter that he’s done the same thing or that he pushed you to this. He’ll make you the villain. He’ll come after me and my practice.”
In my mind’s eye, I can see Jake do all these things. He won’t take my revenge lying down, even if he wants me back. Tyler would be the perfect target for his anger. “What do you want me to do?”
He steps back into the light. A hand lands on my forearm, urging me to abandon my defensive stance. As my arms fall, Tyler pulls me into him and hugs me, rewarding me for my deference with the return of his physical affection. “You should go home, wait for him. Confront him about the affair. Don’t tell him about tonight.” He brushes my hair away from my face with his fingertips and tilts up my chin so that I can look into his eyes. “You have nothing to gain by telling him. He’ll say you’re as bad as him.”
“I want to be as bad as him.”
His look chides me. “No, you don’t.”
“But I want to see you again.”
He releases me from his embrace. “Beth, I think you’re great. You’re beautiful. Smart.”
“But?”
“I have my daughter to think about. If I lose my license, how will I support her?” He shakes his head. “I am so sorry. I saw you and . . .” A loud exhale fills the room. “I let other things get the best of me. I didn’t act professionally. There are rules against—”
“I’m not your patient.”
“Even former patients.”
“I’m not pressing charges.”
“Your husband could. He could argue that I influenced you to end your marriage for my personal gain, abusing my position as your psychiatrist.”
His reaches out toward me. The light hits the shiny spandex blend fabric in his palm. It’s my dress, balled up like used tissue. My underwear is hidden inside, no doubt. “I can’t see you again.” His voice is gentle yet firm. It’s a shrink’s tone, borrowed from years of books on positive discipline. “You should go home to your husband.”
I accept my clothing and excuse myself to the bathroom. He calls through the door that I am welcome to shower. Of course I am. Better for him if all DNA evidence of our act is scrubbed from my body. Should I reveal his name and my lawyer husband decide to go after him, it will be my word against his. He can argue that I made the whole thing up. Delusions as an outgrowth of postpartum depression.
The bathroom light stays off as I dress. The sight of my ruffled hair and rumpled clothing against the backdrop of the unfamiliar wall tile will humiliate me more than any mug shot. It’s bad enough that I’ll have to pass the park on the way to my building, dodging the rotating sprinklers spraying the walkway in my party dress, looking like yesterday’s newspaper. I rub my eyes hard, forestalling the frustrated tears building beneath my lower lids. Crying will only make me hate myself more. And I do hate myself. I was half of a power couple with a healthy baby girl. I’ll never be that again, no matter what I do. If I stay with Jake, I will be the laughingstock wife of a philandering husband. If I leave him, I will be the poor single mother with the waiting newborn at home.
I cannot abide either role. The only option is to make Colleen go away.
LIZA
A golden glow rouses me from sleep. The sun peeks above the horizon, long arms stretching across the landscape and reaching through my uncovered bedroom window. I think about showering and food but can’t motivate myself to leave the body heat cocoon beneath the covers. Instead, I slide my laptop off of the bedside table and reread the scene penned the prior evening.
I edit for an hour. Around nine, I become offended by the human smell of the room and take a scalding, soapy shower. The hot water reddens my skin and purges my pores. I pack my bag and check out, thinking about David and his weekend of work (with Cameron), trying not to think about Trevor. I grab Starbucks across the street from the hotel. Given the free morning brew offered in all the breakfast panels, spending five dollars on a latte feels wasteful, but I don’t want to run into my editor right now. It was hard enough saying good night. I’m not ready for good morning.
I can’t concentrate during my panel, though no one appears to notice. My fellow authors are too busy squeezing mentions of their current books into responses to questions about their first novels. The moderator is a timid woman, ill-suited to the job of dividing speaking time between the five egos on this dais. She’s being talked over by an author who has seized every opportunity to rebut critics of her panned second book. If I were in charge, I’d make sure to call on individual authors in order to keep the panel from becoming an infomercial for the loudmouth’s latest. But I’m not, and to be honest, I’m too distracted to care. At the end of the day, maybe one person out of the few dozen gathered will buy a book. If that sale doesn’t go to me, so be it. I didn’t come here to
fight with my compatriots.
I didn’t come here to indulge in sexual fantasies, either. Yet it’s difficult not to hear Beth’s running description of Trevor’s body, forged, she says, like Spartan armor.
“Liza?”
The moderator’s smile is strained. I’m that kid caught daydreaming in math class. She’s the teacher who has called me out. “I’m sorry. Got a little lost there thinking about the relation of my first book to my most recent, Accused Woman.” When in doubt, sell.
“The question concerned how authors identify with dark subject matter. You had to not only imagine a victim of child abuse in Drowned Secrets but also believably write about the response to that abuse from the perspective of a twelve-year-old girl . . .”
She trails off, hoping I’ll fill in the blanks. The crowd stares as though I’m the driver in a slow-motion accident. Pressure builds deep in my hippocampus. “Well, I don’t exactly know.”
The moderator blinks, waiting for me to continue.
My palms open in a guilty appeal to the crowd. “I think when the writing is going well, you are so immersed in the character that everything’s automatic. It’s a bit like having an Ouija board instead of a keyboard.”
The audience is silent. A person in the front of the crowd flashes a nervous smile as though I’ve just confessed to actually communing with spirits or something similarly insane. It’s an analogy, people. Get with it.
“Well, how did you come up with the idea?”
“Um . . .” The audience’s eyes speckle my body with dozens of laser sights. Sweat buds on my hairline. “I think I had this character in my head, and I really wanted to tell her story.”
An audience member raises her hand. She is a younger woman with a notebook in her lap—an MFA student, if I had to guess. The moderator acknowledges her with the enthusiasm of a teacher calling on a class pet. “But how do you get characters in your head in the first place?” she asks.
She might as well demand to know how images show up on a television screen. Clearly, there’s rhyme and reason behind it. But damned if I understand. “They’re just there.”
The student gears up for a follow-up. Thankfully, loudmouth starts before she can get it out. “What Liza says about this automatic writing, if you will, really resonated with me. When you’ve been immersed in the character for so long, you really do feel what they feel and write what they are thinking. You don’t have to imagine it anymore. It’s a bit like acting in that way. In my latest book, the main character, Jolene, is, of course, in a situation I would never find myself in, God willing. She’s living in a dystopia where the government can hear your thoughts. Yet I can imagine her pain of not having privacy. I don’t need to be nineteen, either. You know, as a person, you can identify. You can picture yourself, and it really is . . .”
I nod as though I agree with everything my fellow author is saying. In my head, I only hear Beth.
Chapter 10
I can’t go home. Nothing is there except an empty bed with cold sheets. A dark room. That’s too much for my ruthless imagination. Instead of the back of my eyelids, I’ll see Colleen with my husband, flaunting her prechild body. Laughing at me.
The sprinklers tick their countdown to daylight. I flee the spray as fast as I can in my heels. Though the moon is only a quarter full, the city is as bright and beckoning as ever. I walk toward the center of it, a bug to a black light, following the traffic signals and restaurant signs until I find myself at the Chambers Street subway entrance.
The underground is lit up like the inside of a refrigerator. I slide my metro card through the turnstile and follow signs to the J train, letting my subconscious lead the way. My waking mind doesn’t know why I want to head east toward the outer boroughs. All I’m aware of is a need to get away—far, far away. Away from my lonely apartment. Away from Tyler. Away from myself.
I pass through the sliding door into an empty car. Midnight is an in-between hour in Manhattan. People are where they planned to be. Few are ready to go elsewhere, yet. The train screeches down the track, rumbling beneath me, lulling me into a half-conscious state. I am here, sitting on this hard plastic seat, listening to the doors rattle as they open and the PA system tell me to be wary of them as they close. I am also not here. My mind has escaped to a not-so-distant past.
Jake and I are at dinner, a restaurant near Gramercy Park that looks like a cross between a posh townhouse and a train station. The tables are intimate affairs beneath oversized crystal chandeliers. Our table is beside a demilune window. It’s the best seat in the house, and Jake has requested it special. He wants to discuss something important.
I sit across from him, dressed in something yacht-worthy. Tight and white. The kind of unforgiving ensemble I wore before Vicky kicked out my lower abdomen and stretched apart my hips. I’m nervous beneath my meticulously applied makeup. My husband seems more serious than usual.
He places his hand on mine. The ball of his palm is calloused from hours lifting weights at the gym, another consequence of the hair loss. If he can’t have a mane like a twentysomething, he’s damn sure going to have a body like one. He strokes the diamond on my left hand.
“I’m ready.”
I stare at him, waiting for elaboration. He smiles at me as though I’m dense or defective.
“A baby.” Again, he grins. “I know you’ve wanted to try for a while and I’ve been back and forth. But I realize that it’s not fair to make you wait any longer. You will be a great mom, and you deserve a child. And I really want to be a father. So what the hell? Let’s make a baby.”
In retrospect, the memory isn’t as sweet as I’d once thought. At the time, I’d leapt from my chair and landed in his lap, covering his squinched face with kisses. His admission had seemed to validate our whole relationship. I’d told him to forget a full meal. We should eat oysters and get to the fun part. I didn’t think, until now, about the notes of surrender in his speech. It was almost like Jake had felt I’d earned the right to a baby, whether or not he was prepared to have one.
The train slows to a stop. A mechanical voice informs me that I’m on Marcy Avenue and Broadway, which is disorienting since Manhattan’s Broadway lies three blocks east of my apartment, and I’ve traveled in that direction for the past twenty-five minutes. Brooklyn, then.
I exit the car and ascend the steps. There’s a park to my right. Dark with plenty of trees to hide behind. I hurry past it, more jogging than walking. Ready to run. Tyler’s not popping out from a bar to save me this time.
I hear the highway on my left. I cut right, traveling down Division Avenue into the Jewish section of Williamsburg. A kosher grocery and liquor store dominates the corner. The Star of David marks a synagogue up ahead. Half the signs are in Hebrew. Car horns cut through the quiet like a machete. I veer right, instinctively heading toward the noisier, non-family-friendly side of area. That’s where she lives.
Eventually, I hit Ninth Street. I’m drawn toward the East River and the apartment that she told Jake in an e-mail “overlooks the water, for now.” Instead of a park lining the river, a massive construction zone flanks the bank, cordoned off by a chain link fence and makeshift cardboard wall. Through the mesh wire I see flattened dirt and the line of excavators that will dig down to the bedrock beneath the river, ensuring that the skyscraper-to-be is bolted to a foundation stronger than sand. Man-made dirt hills, as tall as a person, are located at the edge of the property. They’ve already started digging.
I cross to the sidewalk beside the future luxury apartment complex and turn to face the building across the street. It’s a squat warehouse, illegally converted, no doubt, into loft apartments and artist spaces. Multipane factory windows overlook midtown. Some are lit, revealing their open floor plans and brick interior walls, betraying that their owners are inside watching television or entertaining, not making matzo or chocolate or whatever the factory was originally slated to produce.
I count floors, trying to remember Officer Colleen’s apartmen
t number. It was one something. Usually, that would denote the first floor, but things are wonky in Brooklyn. Maybe the basement counts.
One of the dark apartments blooms to life. The light reveals a white L-shaped couch with a kitchenette steps behind it. A naked woman walks to the eating area and straddles a stool at the breakfast bar. She must know people from the street can see her. Perhaps she’s gotten used to the construction site being vacant at this hour. More likely she enjoys voyeurs.
Her hair is piled atop her head in a messy bun. She looks like Officer Colleen, but every dark-haired petite woman would look like her at this distance. A man saunters from a back room. He buttons a shirt over his boxers. The way he does it, elbows high, hands down, screams my husband. I’ve seen him do this same act thousands of times. Shirt secure, he strides into the living room and grabs what must be his suit pants off the back of the couch. He jostles his legs inside, hopping to pull the tailored trousers over his firm backside. She turns in the chair to face him and the window. Her legs are spread like how a man would sit on a horse. She’s trying to get him to stay. Sharon Stone style.
I watch him as though he’s an actor in a movie and not my husband and the father of my child. The window is a television set. What I am seeing isn’t real.
He walks back toward the breakfast bar and reaches past her naked torso to a neighboring stool. A jacket waves in the air. He flings it over his shoulder, as though posing for a magazine. She stands, hands on her hips. He kisses her on the forehead and heads to the door. She follows him, brushing his side. Her walk is half sexy, half angry. I’m reminded of a cat scratching against a leg. They disappear. A moment later, she returns to the kitchen. Alone.
He must be coming down the stairs. I walk away from the streetlight and the chain link fence, pressing my back against the temporary wall around the left side of the construction site. The ambient light from the building in front of me is still too bright. He’ll see me. I hurry along the temporary wall, papered with fliers for street fairs and unknown bands, until I see a door. The wood has been kicked in near the knob.