Do This For Me

by Eliza Kennedy

  I was confused. “When was this?”

  “About two years ago.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve been together a long time, right? And we’ve been happy. Those early years, when you were killing yourself at the firm, and I was struggling to finish my dissertation? They were the best times of my life. But they were also a blur. We were always working, always parenting—apart or together. Time passed. The girls got older. You were so successful. Then my career took off. It was unreal, and so exciting. It felt like we had everything we’d ever dreamed of. But one day, it hit me. There was something I didn’t have anymore.” He paused. “You.”

  “What are you talking about, Aaron?”

  “I’m trying to say that we’d lost each other. As a couple. We were drifting. And yes, I know that’s a cliché. But when it’s an accurate description of your reality, the fact that it’s dumb and trite and what everybody says in this situation doesn’t really matter that much.”

  I was doing my best to remain calm. To fight the enraged howl, lunging upward, begging for release. “I have to tell you, I’ve never felt that way. We’re busy people. Just because we don’t spend every waking moment together doesn’t mean we’re living separate lives.”

  He pushed his mug aside and reached for my hands. He pressed them together within his. “Life is good, Raney. On the surface, everything’s fine. We rarely fight. The girls are great. The machine is running smoothly. Which is what it felt like sometimes. A machine, operating without much spontaneity, or togetherness.”

  “We’re living separate lives? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Do you know how many times we’ve gone out, alone, in the last year? Twice. How many evenings we spend with each other at home? One a week, tops.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I did. I would say we needed to make more time for each other. And things would be better—until the next work emergency or Maisie meltdown. I started feeling bad about complaining. You’re such a superhero. It’s one of the things I love about you. But you give it all to the girls and the firm. These last few years, you haven’t been sharing your life with me.”

  “What is it you want me to share? How an associate dropped a ball on something? The joke Wally told at a partner meeting? It’s all pretty boring. Especially compared to your life. The books, the show. How am I supposed to compete with that?”

  He looked perplexed. “Why would you have to compete?”

  “You know what I mean,” I said. “My day-to-day isn’t that interesting.”

  “You’re what’s interesting. If you want to share something, I want to hear it. I think you’re the most amazing person on the planet.”

  I shrank away. “So it’s my fault. I, what—drove you into her arms?”

  He sighed, defeated. “This is what I was worried about. I’m trying to explain, and you only hear excuses. You hear me blaming you.”

  “Because you are.”

  “I’m not! I’m saying there was a void in my life—a void that was as much my fault as yours. I didn’t try to find you again. I didn’t fight my way back.”

  “Why not? If you loved me, you realized something was wrong…why not try harder?”

  He bowed his head. “I wish I had a satisfying answer. I was weak. I am weak.”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment. I was gathering my strength.

  “She came along,” I said. “Tell me how that happened.”

  He rose to refill his coffee, then returned to the table. Those hangdog eyes. “The network hired Deirdre to help me develop the show. I was a television rookie, whereas she had a lot of experience as a producer. She was helpful. And really nice. She—”

  I set my mug on the table, a little too hard. “I’m sure she’s lovely, but you can skip the specifics.”

  “I’m trying to answer your question.” He was choosing his words with care. “To do that, I have to say a few things about her. Because it explains why…I began to look forward to seeing her. Talking with her became a fun part of my day. We became friends. She was having trouble in her marriage. We discussed it. We started having lunch together. We e-mailed at night and on the weekends. I found myself thinking about her when she wasn’t around. I found myself…” He buried his face in his hands. “Oh, God. This is hard.”

  Hard? It was killing me. But he was only giving me what I asked for.

  “I love you, Raney. You have to remember that. That’s what’s real, and important.”

  I was still struggling to stay calm. “You must have known what you were doing was wrong. Didn’t you feel guilty?”

  “It’s kind of remarkable, the contortions your mind is capable of. The justifications and delusions. How elastic your morality can be when it runs up against your…” He faltered, looking down. “Against what you want. How did it happen? Step by very, very small step. Talking. Getting coffee. Getting lunch. Texting. And at every turn, I told myself that I wasn’t doing anything wrong. She’s my friend. A man and a woman can be friends! I love my wife. I would never do anything to hurt her.”

  Aaron looked up from his nearly empty cup, eyes pleading now. “I believed all that. It’s what I said to reassure myself that I wouldn’t really do the thing that I…that I increasingly wanted to do.”

  “And that you ultimately decided to do,” I said. “You decided to cheat.”

  “Decided?” he said, as if confused by the word. “Did I consciously decide?”

  “You bought her a plane ticket, Aaron. You had a hotel room.”

  “I know, but you’re suggesting something deliberate. I didn’t have a moment where I rubbed my hands together and said, ‘Now I’m going to commit adultery!’ ”

  “Still, you wanted to,” I insisted. “At some point, you decided to do it. To stop being a faithful husband, and to start cheating.”

  “I must have,” he said sadly. “But I didn’t think about it that way.”

  * * *

  —

  “So according to him we’ve changed,” I said to Bogard the next day. “I don’t buy it—I mean, how convenient, right? But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that he genuinely believes this. It still doesn’t explain anything, because it doesn’t explain him. He’s earnest and authentic and good. He’s an entomologist, Doctor—he literally wouldn’t hurt a fly.” I paused. “So why did he decide to hurt me?”

  “Let’s talk about your treasure chest,” Bogard suggested.

  “Why?”

  “It’s a fascinating way to compartmentalize yourself, don’t you think?”

  “More like useless.” I remembered I was waiting for client sign-off on a brief. I pulled out my phone. “Look how much good it’s done me the last few weeks.”

  “Your choice of container is intriguing,” he noted.

  “I was going to go with a Rubbermaid storage locker, but plastic is full of toxins, so…”

  “Why don’t you put your phone away?”

  I dropped it into my bag.

  “What was happening in your life that you felt such anxiety?” Bogard asked.

  I thought about it. “Nothing in particular. I didn’t remember my parents’ death, so no trauma there.” I paused. “I suppose the world did feel…precarious. It was just me and my grandmother. We didn’t have a lot of money. We lived in a bad neighborhood.”

  “Why didn’t you move?”

  “I never asked Grandma about it, but looking back, I think she didn’t have a lot of inner resources. Her daughter had died. For her, that kind of ended things. She wasn’t one of those sassy seniors who flourish in the face of tragedy. She got the job done—she kept me fed and clothed and safe, she was unfailingly gentle—but her wherewithal was limited.”

  “Did you feel loved?”

  “Sure.”

  Bogard
peered at me over his spectacles. “I sense a ‘but’ coming on.”

  “Well, I was just thinking. I did see…pictures. From before. Grandma with my mother, with my grandfather. With this crazy old car she had. Smiling, laughing. Happy. I never knew her like that. She was anxious. Tired. I seemed to overwhelm her, though I don’t think I was that much trouble. I tried not to be. Anyway, rather than burden her with my troubles, I decided to cope with them on my own.”

  “Treasure chests hold valuable things,” Bogard remarked. “Gold. Jewels. Are you sure it was only unpleasant feelings you locked away?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Strong emotions of any kind are powerful. They can be unsettling. Uncomfortable.”

  I was itching to check my phone again. “If you say so.”

  “Do you disagree?”

  “I’m not a robot, Doctor. I express happiness and contentment on a daily basis. I never locked away my love for the girls. Or Aaron.”

  “You filled the chest every day before school? And, later, before work?”

  I wished he wasn’t so fixated on the stupid chest. “Shouldn’t we be talking about my marriage?”

  “Indulge me.”

  “I filled it every day, more or less.”

  “And when your day was done, did you unlock the chest? Did you release all those emotions?”

  I thought about it. “Well, no. That would be…I mean, that’s kind of silly, isn’t it?”

  “Sillier than locking them up in the first place?”

  “I unlocked it with Aaron,” I said. “I would tell him things. My worries, and troubles.”

  “Always?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Maybe not as much lately, but…no. Not true. I did. Always.”

  Bogard nodded. “Interesting.”

  FOURTEEN

  A few weeks later, I went to the gym at lunchtime. I had always thought exercise was a waste of time. But since my great marital cataclysm, I’d found myself with a ridiculous amount of excess energy. Long walks, taking the stairs—nothing helped. Most nights I spent hours staring at the ceiling, brain whirring, body fizzing with restlessness.

  So shortly after returning home, I joined a sleek and intimidating “fitness center” down the street from the firm, signing up for a batch of sessions with a “personal fitness consultant.” Jared was a cheerful boy with a blocky blond head. Raised in Wisconsin. Partial to tight T-shirts. Impervious to irony.

  “What would you say is your primary fitness goal?” he asked, during our first meeting.

  “Cessation of thought,” I replied.

  His baby-smooth forehead crinkled. “Huh.”

  I was sure I’d despise him. I was sure I’d despise the entire enterprise—the sweaty, mirrored cave, the throbbing music, the grunters and gaspers and conspicuous preeners. But it wasn’t that bad. Jared was patient and encouraging, impressed by my stamina and reluctance to rest between sets (why waste time?).

  We were focusing on my lower body that day. “Grasp the bar and raise it slowly, keeping your shoulders relaxed,” he instructed me.

  “Feet apart?”

  “Not as such.” Jared loved that phrase.

  I put my feet together. I bent. I grasped. I raised.

  “Good!” I did it nine more times. “You’re feeling that in your glutes, right?”

  “My glutes are in my arms?”

  His forehead crinkled. “Um, no…”

  I was wearing baggy sweatpants and one of Kate’s cross-country tank tops. As I lifted the bar again, I caught my reflection in the mirror.

  Were those my arms? They seemed to have…muscles.

  “I look good,” I blurted out.

  “You’ve been coming every day,” Jared said. “It’s starting to show.”

  I lifted the bar again. Then I stopped smiling. This is about sleeping better, I reminded myself. Looks don’t come into it.

  I thought I knew myself back then. I didn’t know myself at all.

  * * *

  —

  Ordinary life resumed. The girls went to and from school, sports, the homes of friends. I went to and from work. Aaron threw himself into research for his next book.

  We kept talking. We let our conversations unfold organically, keeping our ground rules in mind. Love. Honesty. No storming out.

  I tended to find myself at one of two extremes. The first was a place of remarkable calm. I had a genuine desire to know how the man I loved had come to do and feel things so foreign to my understanding of our relationship. The fact of his cheating was so unreal that at times I could view his infidelity with an almost detached curiosity. That actually happened? How astonishing.

  The second place was darker and all too real. There, I thrashed around in my now-familiar mix of rage, fear and humiliation. How could he? Why would he? Who was he?

  Aaron was struggling, too. Intensely guilty, ashamed, forced to articulate the impulses that led him to do what he did. Sometimes eager to take the blame. Sometimes defensive.

  Still, we talked.

  “What’s the thought process that allows you to go from missing your wife’s company to copulating with a coworker?” I asked one night.

  It was a Thursday in late October, over a month since I’d come home. The girls were upstairs doing homework. Aaron and I were cleaning up after dinner.

  He rinsed a saucepan. “Do you want an answer, or are you going on the attack?”

  “You were feeling lonely. Why not join a book club? Take up a hobby, like…I don’t know.” I snapped out my dish towel. “Competitive birding. Is an affair really the answer?”

  “Of course not. But I didn’t want a friend. I wanted romance. I wanted what we’d lost.”

  “We,” I repeated. “What we lost. Yet you didn’t talk to me. You went elsewhere.”

  “I tried talking to you. You were always working. Or wrapped up with the girls.”

  I threw my towel onto the floor. “And you wonder why I feel blamed.”

  Aaron was in an impossible position, forced to answer my questions, then deal with the inevitable blowback. To his credit, he didn’t give up.

  “You want me to be honest, Raney. I’m being honest. My affair was wrong. But it was a reaction to what was going on between you and me.”

  I looked at him closely. My husband. The man I’d known half my life. The man who was my life. So loved, so familiar, so utterly known—and yet so completely strange! How could he be the boy who came up to me at that party, the voice on the phone telling me not to cry, the man sitting on the kitchen floor listening to me catalog my anxieties—and also the man standing before me now, confessing the urges that had led him to sleep with someone else?

  I didn’t—couldn’t—understand.

  “This revelation,” I said. “About us growing apart. You said it hit you one day. When?”

  He shut off the water and dried his hands. “Do you remember Bethany and Georgia’s wedding?”

  “Of course.” They were some of our closest college friends, married two summers ago.

  “We were in the third row, remember? The moment the ‘Wedding March’ started, everybody stood up to see Georgia come sailing up the aisle. I had a really good view of Bethany. She was watching Georgia, too, and the expression on her face…” He trailed off. “She was radiant. She was looking at the best thing that had ever happened to her. I was so happy for her. Then I realized something. You used to look at me like that.”

  I pulled out a chair and sat down. “We are so broken.”

  “Raney, no!” Aaron sat across from me. “We’re not broken. We’re…dented. We’re here because we have something worth saving.”

  “ ‘Missing you.’ That was the subject line of the e-mail you sent me. How could you write that, when you were with someone else?”

 
; “Because it was still true.”

  “I bought a travel guide to San Francisco,” I said, as if this were a defense against his argument. “I want to spend time with you. I just…” I picked at the grain of the table with my thumbnail.

  He reached for my hand. I drew it back. “Tell me about Deirdre.”

  This surprised him. “I thought you didn’t want—”

  “Specifics,” I said. “I know. I changed my mind.”

  “Okay.” He cleared his throat, tugged at an ear. “Well, she’s…a nice person, believe it or not. She’s smart. Funny. She—”

  “Is she more attractive than I am?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  That was way too quick. “You’re lying.”

  “I’m telling the truth.”

  “You aren’t attracted to me anymore.” It was a statement, not a question. I wanted desperately to be contradicted.

  “Of course I am, Raney. I always have been.”

  “What does she look like?”

  He hesitated.

  I reached for my phone. “I’m googling her.”

  “No. Please.” He sighed. “This is hard, okay? To tell you about the person I…but okay. She’s not as attractive as you are. She’s different. I mean, a different type of woman. She’s…I guess you’d say she’s full-bodied.”

  I’d been watching his face closely, intent on what he was saying. Now I recoiled.

  “She’s my age. She’s not…I mean, when we first met, I wasn’t attracted to her.”

  Deirdre was a full-bodied woman. I’d watched his mouth form those words, describe her body. A body he had possessed with his own. Caressed and kissed. His mouth on…what? Her round breasts. His hands on her voluptuous, feminine hips.

  I looked at my hands, clinging to each other on the table. I’d always thought they were my best feature—delicate, with long, slender fingers. Now they seemed bony. Bloodless.

  Full-bodied. Is that what he liked? Is that what he wanted, before he got stuck with me?

  “Raney?” Aaron watched me closely. “Talk to me. Please.”

  “Keep going,” I said.