Fly Away Home

by Jennifer Weiner

  She rested her head on the counter, and, after a minute, she felt Ceil’s small hand on her back. “You can stay here for as long as you want.” Sylvie suppressed a shudder as she thought of the guest bedroom, Larry’s showplace. The bed was made of unvarnished birch branches, formed roughly in the shape of a nest. You had to clamber over the sharp sticks that stuck out in every direction to get to the mattress. On the wall was a truly disturbing piece of art, a white-on-white oil-paint oval with a single drop of red at its center, titled Afterbirth.

  “Maybe for a few nights,” she said. “Then I’m going somewhere else. You can’t tell Richard where.”

  “I’m not speaking to Richard unless you tell me it’s okay. At which point I will have a few choice remarks.” She patted Sylvie’s back again. “So where do you think? Canyon Ranch? Lake Austin? Rancho La Puerta? Do you want company? I could pick a fight with Larry and come with you.” She thought, drumming her fingers on the marble. “Wherever you decide, you should have Clarissa call ahead and explain the situation.” More drumming. “Although probably people know the situation by now.”

  Sylvie thought of the laptop, its flickering screen. She remembered a Leonard Cohen song that Lizzie used to play, over and over, in the middle of the night, which honestly, in retrospect, should have been a sign: “Everybody Knows,” the song was called. When Eliot Spitzer had had his troubles, out of some mixture of sympathy and schadenfreude, she’d Googled Silda Spitzer’s name, and been horrified (and, a little titillated) by what she’d read. What Was She Thinking? Silda Joins Democrats’ First Wives Club. “What’s more disgusting than a lyin’, no good, cheatin, hypocritical, political man?” one indignant blogger had asked. “Their wives who stand by looking dumbfounded as their unfaithful husbands apologize to the public. Do these women have no pride?”

  No pride, she thought. But what was pride compared to a life she’d loved? What would she do now, alone at her age? How could she start again, with no husband, no job, no place in the world? She let Ceil lead her toward the bathroom (more white marble, white towels, and a giant white Jacuzzi), and undressed without looking at her body, because considering her bulges and wrinkles, her stretch marks and scars, would have her, inevitably, comparing herself to Joelle, whose flesh was probably smooth and unblemished as a rose’s petals. With her eyes squeezed shut, she got into the tub, and soaked until the water went cold. Then she wrapped herself in one of Ceil’s bath sheets and padded into the horrible guest room. Ceil had made up the bed with flowered flannel sheets that Sylvie doubted Larry had ever slept on or even knew about. There was a cup of tea steaming on the bedside table, another cinnamon roll beside it, and a stack of well-worn novels, some of them dating back to their college years. She settled herself gingerly on top of the mattress. Her lower back was throbbing, her legs ached. So did her chest, like she’d been punched there over and over. She crossed her hands, age-spotted, the nails neatly kept, over her heart, and pushed down, trying to ease the pain, lying motionless on her back until her friend slipped into the room to turn out the lights.

  DIANA

  Gary had been late. Trust her husband to be late on a night like this, to leave her sitting alone in her little black dress and strappy, high-heeled sandals, staring through the windows that had been flung open to the soft summer night and feeling, or imagining that she could feel, every eye in the room upon her.

  If you’d asked her friends and neighbors—not that anyone had, or ever would—Diana assumed they would have said she and Gary appeared reasonably happy. True, over their seven years together, their sex life never got past perfunctory, but the neighbors wouldn’t know about that, and Diana could deal with perfunctory, telling herself that maybe she just didn’t have a very strong sex drive, and that the hot stuff faded away for everyone else anyhow.

  She loved the day-to-dayness of her life, the balance she’d struck between work in the ER and days at home with her boy. Milo had been an easy baby, placid and good-natured, always happy to go down for a nap in the sunny nursery Diana had furnished and painted herself, always delighted to see her when she lifted him out of his crib. She adored their cozy brick row house, even if it was still mostly empty. She worked twelve-hour shifts, three days a week, and on her days off she would take Milo to the playground, to music class and tumbling class and on errands to the dry cleaner’s or the grocery store. After lunch, she would sing him to sleep and spend a few hours cleaning the house, paying the bills, or folding the laundry while he napped. Then, just as boredom set in, just when she was sure she couldn’t read Red Fish Blue Fish one more time, or sing “Tingalayo” again, or play another game of Sorry, it was time to go to work, back to the frenzy and demands and adrenaline rush of a big-city emergency room, where you never knew what was going to come through the door. It all suited Diana just fine.

  They lived in a wonderful neighborhood—it wasn’t New York, but it had plenty to offer. Within a twelve-block walk there were bars and French cafés and Vietnamese noodle shops, bakeries and gelaterias, the requisite coffee shop on each corner, plus a craft brewery that served the best veggie burgers she’d ever tasted. On Sundays she and Gary would try different places for brunch, sampling the breakfast pizza at Café Estelle and the stuffed French toast at Sabrina’s, pushing Milo in his stroller or, when he got older, holding his hands, walking along and admiring the windowboxes, peeking through people’s blinds to see how they’d decorated their living rooms, and stopping at the little neighborhood park for a few trips down the slide on the way home. With neighbors calling hellos and a pleasant afternoon awaiting her—Milo would nap, or read, or play with his Legos, and Gary would zone out in front of the television set with his laptop, leaving Diana with a few hours for a long run and a soak in the tub—she would think, happily, even a little smugly, that she’d gotten exactly the life she’d wanted: the husband, the child, the nest that she was in the process of feathering. On the best days, it would be enough to quiet the teasing, drawling voice in her head, the voice that sounded a lot like her sister saying that Gary was the tiniest bit stupid and boring to boot, that Gary, with his love for video games and YouTube videos, wasn’t the right man for her; that he was maybe not much of a man at all.

  When Diana was in college she’d read about arranged marriages, and how they lasted longer than so-called love marriages did, because the people who were in them knew they wouldn’t have romance or passion to carry them along. They went in knowing that their marriage was a thing they’d have to create from scratch and work hard to maintain. That sounded sensible to Diana, who, in deciding on Gary, had in effect arranged her own marriage, choosing a man who was acceptable on every front and then building a marriage with the same will and concentration she’d once brought to her college papers and grade-school dioramas. But the older she got, the more she worried that passion, chemistry, attraction, whatever you wanted to call it, was like a kind of frosting that could be smoothed over the cracks and lumps of a badly baked cake. Passion mattered … and she’d never really had much with Gary.

  The sex, which had never been great, had gotten worse, and much more sporadic, in the post-Milo years. Even if she wasn’t constantly exhausted, even if she came home from the hospital or a day at the playground to find the bed made, the laundry folded, a tasty and nutritious dinner prepared and the table set, even if there’d been someone there to spirit Milo away to a playground or the library or the children’s museum for an edifying hour or two, Diana just wasn’t interested. Most nights she’d lie beside Gary until he fell asleep, fretting over how close she’d come to resembling the women’s-magazine cliché, the wife who no longer wanted her husband. When she was with Hal, she’d read those articles with a lofty sense of superiority, thinking how silly those new mommies sounded. How hard was it to endure a few kisses, to spread your legs and offer up a few token moans for the five (or three) minutes it would take the man to finish his business?

  The truth she learned when she became a mother herself was that she
found the kind of sex her friend Lynette called the “charity ball” unendurable. After a day of tending to her patients, who’d show up at the ER with everything from a splinter to a rare and hard-to-diagnose parasite, and a night spent minding her son, she couldn’t stand another set of hands or lips on her, another set of demands.

  Still, she tried. On Saturday night she would shave her legs, brush and floss with extra care, and if Gary smiled at her from the depths of the couch, if he folded up his laptop and asked, in his good-natured teasing tone, whether she was prepared to fulfill her marital obligations, she’d make herself smile back at him, and let him take her hand and lead her to the bedroom. Sometimes it would be over almost immediately. (“Sorry,” her husband would gasp, spent and wilting against the side of her thigh. “Sorry, Diana, but it’s been a while.”) That, sadly, was the best-case scenario. The worst times were when it took forever. Diana would lie underneath her husband, hands on his scrawny shoulders, face buried in his neck, while he’d pump and huff and pant and sweat. Sometimes she’d give a few tentative moans to speed things along, and sometimes, that would work … but sometimes Gary would roll off her without having finished.

  “You’re so wet,” he’d say, in a tone just short of accusatory. He’d sigh up at the ceiling, then take his slick penis in his hand and start pumping, with the burdened expression of a man who’d been forced to shovel the driveway just when the game was getting interesting. Diana would lie beside him, wondering about the etiquette: Should she help? If so, how? She’d roll onto her side and rest her cheek on his chest, feeling the rapid rise and fall of his breath, waiting for his final gasp and shudder and the explosion of bleach-smelling sticky stuff.

  “Grab me a towel, would you?” he’d ask, still breathing hard, and she’d hurry out of bed, glad for the excuse to leave his side.

  He was a good guy, pleasant enough, but the things he enjoyed and wanted to talk about—professional sports, the mash-ups he made on his computer, the various online role-playing games that he found more engrossing than real life—were not things that interested her. But what could she do? She’d made a promise, she’d taken vows, she’d had a baby. She’d gone into marriage as an adult, with her eyes wide open. She had, as the saying went, made her bed, and if she found it hard or lumpy, it was no one’s fault but her own. Love was a choice. She’d read that once, in a novel one of the patients had discarded in the waiting room. Love was a choice, and she was determined to make it, determined to make her marriage work, determined not to fail.

  Tell him. For months, for years, in spite of her resolve, the words beat like a drum in Diana’s head. Tell him, she would think, checking her e-mail, folding her husband’s underpants while a police procedural blared on the TV. Tell him how you feel. It isn’t fair to stay married to him, just going along, pretending everything’s fine, pretending you’re feeling something you’re not.

  In the shower, brushing her teeth, retrieving the paper from the front step, she’d rehearse it in her head. Gary, there’s something we need to talk about. Something I need to tell you. I’ve been feeling … And this was where she stopped. What were the words for what she needed to say? The ones that came to mind were I’m just not that into you, but that wouldn’t work. No way could she dismiss her husband, take the first steps toward ending their marriage, breaking up their family, breaking his heart and maybe her son’s, with something that glib. But what was better?

  She sat in the restaurant, staring out into the darkness, legs crossed beneath her black dress, sipping her wine, until finally her husband appeared, sweaty and disheveled, with the tiniest bit of shirttail sticking out through his fly.

  “Hi, honey,” he’d said, reaching for her hand. “Sorry I’m late. Bad traffic.” Her heart sank as he touched her. There was no spark, no connection, nothing but annoyance and a wish to be left alone or, better yet, to be back home, counting out Milo’s chocolate chips, talking about where he’d sat at lunch and whether he’d ever get picked to be Pet Helper at school. (“I’m always snack cleanup!” he complained. “It just isn’t right!”)

  Sensing her discomfort, Gary peered at her across the candlelit table. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, and emptied her glass. The waiter approached, pad and pen in hand, prompting Gary to begin his typical dining-out process of talking to the menu.

  “You, or you?” he asked, pointing at the various items. “Who’s it gonna be? Cassoulet? Coq au vin? You? You?”

  “Gary,” Diana said softly but firmly. “It’s been a long day. Please just pick something.” Left alone long enough, he’d spend ten minutes interrogating the entrées in his Al Pacino voice, demanding that one of them speak up.

  “Well, I told you we didn’t have to go out,” he said. Diana closed her eyes and waited until Gary finally settled on the steak frites. Diana asked for broiled sole, sauce on the side, and more wine. Then Gary got to his feet. “Gotta go drain the dragon,” he said. This was another one of her husband’s quirks. He was incapable of going to the bathroom without announcing his destination, in addition to what he intended to do once he was there. Gotta bleed the lizard. Gotta break the seal. Gotta air out the snake.

  She sat at the table, a basket of bread and a crock of butter and her empty wineglass before her. This is it, she thought. She would never leave him for her lover—not that Doug would ever want her to. Which left her with Gary, draining the dragon, Gary, with his mash-ups, Gary and his nasty Kleenexes next to the bottle of hand lotion by the computer that he left for Diana to pick up and put away; Gary for the rest of her life.

  Before she knew it she was on her feet, her wrap around her shoulders, moving quickly toward the host stand, and the tall oak-and-glass doors beyond it. She was almost there when the waiter, who looked to be all of eighteen, hurried over. “Ma’am? Is everything all right?”

  “Just getting a little fresh air.” Diana’s voice sounded as if it was coming from outer space. She hooked her purse over her shoulder and stepped out into the night.

  She walked around Rittenhouse Square park, then down Chestnut Street all the way to Independence Mall, when her ankles that had chafed from the sandals’ skinny straps wouldn’t let her go any farther. She sat on a wooden bench with her purse in her lap. When she found herself crying, she wasn’t sure whom her tears were for—her father, who’d cheated, her mother, who’d been betrayed, or herself, a cheater and a betrayer who was stuck, stuck with a man she did not love.

  This cannot go on, she thought. In her purse, her telephone buzzed. Doug. U OK? She smiled. She couldn’t help herself. How could she resist him? OK, she typed back. Seconds later, her screen flashed. COME OVER?

  She jumped to her feet and hailed a cab. I deserve this, she told herself. Just for an hour. Sixty minutes of something sweet after this awful, awful day. Ten minutes later, her shoes in her hand, she stood on a stoop on a narrow street in South Philadelphia, knocking on her lover’s door.

  She and Doug Vance actually had met in the emergency room. “What’ve we got?” Diana had asked her intern that rainy Friday morning. Already the waiting room was filling with the lame, the halt, and the blind, the diabetic, the old folks with congestive heart failure, the kids with fevers who would sit for hours staring at the television set bolted to the ceiling or leafing through limp, six-month-old magazines.

  “Eddie Taylor’s back,” said Karen, who was brisk and efficient and reminded Diana of herself, if she’d been five feet tall and Asian. She handed Diana his chart. Diana glanced at it, rolling her eyes. Under “reason for visit,” Eddie, a well-known denizen of the ER, had written “dick is driping.” The spelling mistake wouldn’t have been so galling, Diana thought, if Eddie hadn’t visited the ER the month before for precisely the same dripe. She flipped through a half-dozen folders: an old dude with diarrhea, a teenager who’d been vomiting all night long, an earache, a headache, and …

  Diana peered at the chart. “Foot run over by Mummers?”

  “He�
�s a surgical intern,” Karen said tartly. “Out partying last night. Probably slept it off and didn’t remember until he woke up and saw the damage.”

  Diana picked up the charts, pushed through the door of Exam Room Three, and found Doug Vance, a muscular, ruddy-cheeked, thick-shouldered fellow with a halo of dark curls, sitting on the exam table. He wore a dark-blue sweatshirt and exercise pants with snaps running up the sides of the legs. One foot was clad in a white sock and a running shoe. The other was bare, propped on a bag of ice.

  He grinned at her ruefully. “Morning, Doc.”

  “Good morning yourself.” She stared at his ankle, spectacularly discolored, grotesquely swollen. “Yowza.”

  “Is that a medical term?”

  “From the Latin.” Doug Vance looked familiar. She looked at his face—the round cheeks, the broad features, the nose that was squashed slightly sideways—then back down at his ankle, which was a riot of purple and yellow and black. She pulled on gloves and touched the skin gently, watching for a flinch, listening for a hissed intake of breath. Doug Vance smelled, not unpleasantly, of sweat and beer, which meant that his reactions were, perhaps, not to be trusted. “You’re an intern?”

  “First year. Which you’d think would mean I’d know better.”

  She grasped his toes. “What happened? Should I see the other guy?”

  “Guys, plural. A bunch of them, in sequins. Well, technically, the other guy is a Firestone tire.” Doug sighed. “Can we just say it’s a rugby injury?” He looked at his ankle sadly. “This is very undignified.” Diana took notes as he told her what happened. The story involved a late-night pub crawl and an eventual altercation with some Mummers getting in an early-morning rehearsal under the I-95 overpass near Reed Street. “I mean, they were wearing dresses. How were we supposed to know we weren’t supposed to whistle?” Doug asked, aggrieved. “We’re not from here.”