Results May Vary

by Bethany Chase

  Fingers shaking, I dialed Patrick back again.

  “Caroline? You really need to—”

  “Look, can I meet you to talk about this? I’m not going to attack you, and I’m not going to berate you. I just…want to understand.”

  “I don’t think I can—”

  “Please. Okay? Please meet me. I think I can fairly say it’s the least you could do.”

  He sighed. “Okay. I’m around this weekend. God, I hope I don’t regret this.”

  7

  •

  How I wanted to photograph you—the hands—the mouth—& eyes—& the enveloped in black body—the touch of white—& the throat—

  —Alfred Stieglitz to Georgia O’Keefe, June 1, 1917

  Despite the array of Ruby-related detritus that quickly infiltrated every corner of my house, living with my sister turned out to be both surprisingly easy and surprisingly pleasant. Not only was it a relief to come home to a house with lights on, but my houseguest didn’t seem to expect any form of entertainment beyond just sharing my company. We spent the whole of that first week eating crappy food and watching Battlestar Galactica on my couch. When I stopped one day to replenish our supplies at the Stop & Shop on my way home from work, I paused briefly in front of the aisle with the veggies and salad greens, gleaming with dampness from the moisture jets. And then I shrugged and headed for the frozen aisle. Cooking was something I’d done when I had a husband.

  Every time I got home, Ruby would inevitably be perched on one of my counter stools, a heat-sweated beer can next to her and her bare toes wrapped around the footrest while she clicked softly on her laptop. I’d expected her to complain about the lack of air-conditioning, but she thrived in the warm, breezy air, existing only in her seemingly endless supply of oversized tank tops and loose but tiny shorts.

  “Are you wearing a bra?” I said one evening, and she raised her arms and swayed. Her tank top said OH MY GOD BECKY in big block letters.

  “Absolutely not. And it’s freaking fantastic.”

  “Ouch,” I said.

  “Try it,” she said. “I know you have to do the ladylike thing for work, but by the end of this weekend I want you to be completely feral.”

  “I can’t. I have to go to the city on Saturday. For work,” I lied, seeing the question spark in her face. “I’m not seeing Adam.”

  “Good,” she said. “Hey, I’m about to fire up the vape. You want any?”

  Ruby had liked weed since she was a teenager, and now, with no particular schedule or ironclad commitments, she was partaking frequently. “I don’t know how you can get work done if you’re stoned all the time.”

  “I don’t get stoned. It’s just a happy little glow. Gets those creative juices flowing,” she said, making a wave motion with her hands. “Did I tell you I started a blog?”

  “Oh, thank god. The world was running dry on design blogs run by pretty white girls with good taste.”

  She flounced on the stool and angled her back to me. “You can be such a bitch, Caroline.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be bitchy. It just seems like looking for a job would be a better use of your time. Or working on your portfolio site.”

  “Believe it or not, it’s possible to do both,” she said, in the patient voice of a parent explaining to a toddler. “Maybe even smart. The blog’s a more casual format, so I can post little styled vignettes and sketches and whatnot that I wouldn’t put in my main portfolio.”

  “All right, you know what you’re doing, then. Do you want another Bud?”

  She made a show of refusing to look up from her laptop, just extended one small hand and flexed her fingers like a starfish. I popped the beer open and handed it to her as I passed.

  “You should get baked sometime,” she muttered. “You could freaking use it.”

  •

  I almost found myself wishing I’d taken her up on it, as a swarm of angry hornets buzzed inside me on my way to my appointment with Patrick a few days later. His notes on where to meet had been revealingly specific. Hudson River Park, the pier opposite Twenty-fourth Street. A public place, but not a restaurant or coffee shop offering refreshments, since neither of us wanted to be refreshed. Nowhere near his home, which I remembered hearing was in some artistically gritty neighborhood of Brooklyn; or at least, it had been…before three-quarters of his photographs from the gallery show sold out within five days of the opening. Neil from Development had said: Wasn’t that remarkable? Was I sure about the Whitney wanting to work with him, because otherwise—

  It was a clear, sunny afternoon in the middle of August, only two weeks since all of this began, but it felt like twice as long. As I walked through the park to meet Patrick, people whizzed past me on every form of wheels: cyclists dressed in earnest neck-to-knees spandex, rollerbladers with their tumor-like eruptions of padding, teenagers shouting over the grinding roar of their skateboard wheels. I was almost involved in a collision from trying to avoid both a pair of joggers and a baby carriage at the same time. That’s New York for you—even the parks are crowded.

  I’d been debating whether Patrick would show up late or simply not at all; a passive-aggressive twenty-minutes-tardy arrival felt very much his style. But when the end of the pier came into view he was already there, leaning backward against the railing with his elbows propped against the rail on either side of him, while the sun behind him silhouetted his James Dean–esque pose. When he saw me he did one of those lifted-chin nods that guys use to greet each other.

  As I drew to a stop in front of him, I traced my eyes over his face as if I were preparing to paint him. I absorbed the details of him: the crisp edge of his sideburn against his cheek; the shadow under his full lower lip. A beautiful man, no doubt about that. And with the talent to back up his looks, he was something uncommon. Adam used to make me feel like I was uncommon.

  Patrick tolerated my scrutiny, shifting his weight while he waited for me to speak. Finally his shoulders lifted on a breath.

  “Caroline, what are you looking for?”

  My brain lifted and discarded several possible responses. Answers? Reasons? The words were too simple. I set my wrists on the aluminum railing of the pier and knotted my fingers together. Amber sun gilded the surface of the river with a rippling skin of light.

  “In the Old Master oil paintings, underneath the finished surface, there are layers of mistakes. First attempts at pose and texture and shadow. They got painted over, because the artist didn’t like what he saw, and he wanted the finished result to look a different way. But they’re there. Even though we can’t see them, they’re part of the painting.”

  He nodded. “Pentimenti.”

  Reeling in my grudging respect for his knowledge, I focused on the point I needed to make. “I’m trying to see those layers.”

  “The only person who can help you see them is Adam,” he said.

  “I don’t think so. For one thing, he won’t talk about it. But even if he did…I see only what he chooses.”

  He folded his arms over his chest. “And you think it’s any different with me?”

  I let the last shreds of my pride drop like a paper gown at the doctor’s office. “Patrick, I had no idea he was attracted to men. Seventeen years. Not one clue. Did you know that?”

  “Not in so many words. But it doesn’t surprise me.”

  “How is that possible?” I flinched at the raw pain in my voice.

  “Because I’m sure he worked damn hard to make sure you wouldn’t.” He sighed and turned his own eyes toward the water. “Listen. I’m not the oracle of Adam, okay? I can understand why you want answers to this stuff, but the truth is, I don’t even know him all that well. Definitely not better than you do. The fact that he slept with me doesn’t mean he’s shared anything with me besides his—” His blush, as he caught himself, made him suddenly more vulnerable than the enemy I’d been villainizing for weeks. “Sorry. I guess what I’m trying to say is, don’t blow this up to be something it isn’t
. Just because I’m gay, that doesn’t mean I know what this is all about for him.”

  “You know more than I do.”

  He shook his head from shoulder to shoulder like a metronome. “No. I don’t. All I know is that he liked to have sex with me. I don’t know if I was the first; I don’t know if I was the only. I definitely don’t know what he liked about it compared to sleeping with you.”

  “He didn’t tell you any of that?”

  “Nope. And I really can’t imagine. The one time I tried to hook up with a girl, I was fine for the hand job, but when it was my turn to reciprocate, I went soft faster than you can say sad trombone.”

  Treacherously, laughter spurted out of me.

  “So, I can’t speak to what it’s like to be bi. I’ve known I was gay since I was ten. Out since fourteen. To understand Adam, you need to talk to Adam.”

  “But he won’t,” I said again.

  “So make him. He wants you to take him back, he ought to be willing to do what you ask.”

  “You would think. But it’s like there’s a black hole surrounding the entire topic.”

  “Yeah. You were always a black hole, too.”

  An invisible fist clenched around me. “He talked about me?”

  “Never. I was curious, but he always avoided mentioning you. And he’d turn the topic anytime I asked a question. I guess it made him feel guilty.”

  So, instead, he preferred to pretend I didn’t exist.

  My goodness. How silly of me to have thought I’d reached the border of my heartbreak; just look how much more room there was out here.

  “Listen,” said Patrick quietly after a moment, “for what it’s worth…I am sorry. I shouldn’t have gotten involved, I just…” His gaze drifted to the ground as his words trailed away.

  I remembered suddenly that, for all his sophistication, Patrick was still only twenty-five years old. It was the kind of age where people did things like this and called it unavoidable. “Yeah. Me too. But anyway, what about you?”

  His eyes narrowed and his shoulders inched inward as if tugged by an invisible fishing line. “What about me?”

  “I’m sure you’re not hurting for people to sleep with who don’t have this kind of baggage. So why a married straight guy?”

  His chuckle was a rusty, bitter thing. “Do you have any idea how many ‘straight’ guys”—he etched quote marks in the air with his fingers—“like to hit on me when they get a couple of drinks in them? Sometimes they stare at me, sometimes they try to kiss me, and sometimes they skip the niceties and just grab my dick.”

  Suddenly the clean, water-scented air was sour in my mouth. “So, where exactly on this spectrum of self-delusion was my husband?”

  “That was the problem,” he said, voice soft and underbaked. “Adam wasn’t just another drunk loser.”

  “What was he?” I asked, trembling.

  The suspended lift and drop of his shoulders told me far more than he meant it to. “He was Adam.”

  8

  •

  I do not think that I want to lie down in your crowded bed for bouts of therapeutic lovemaking. Loving you, I see no beauty in lopsided true love.

  —Elizabeth Smart to George Barker, September 27, 1946

  “The little fucker’s in love with him,” I said to Jonathan an hour later, while we guzzled our second round of Sixpoints on his roof. We weren’t supposed to be up there, but the six-story building afforded a great view over the rooftops of Astoria and the Manhattan skyline beyond, which naturally made it irresistible. Jonathan got busted once by his landlady for hosting a Fourth of July picnic there, but when he brought her all the leftover fried chicken and biscuits, she forgave him. He typically achieves with his food what his darlin’s alone cannot.

  “Are you shitting me?” he said. “He told you that, like it was your problem?”

  I rested my head against the wall of the stair bulkhead behind us. “He didn’t tell me. But it was obvious.” Something else that was obvious: If Patrick had found enough to fall in love with, the affair must have been more than just sex. But how much more?

  “Jesus Christ, what a mess,” said Jonathan, pinching the skin between his eyes. “Did it at least help you to talk to him?”

  “No,” I said. “Patrick doesn’t understand Adam any more than I do. Which I guess is a relief. I was hoping I’d get some answers, but I’m not sure I could have handled it if he’d turned out to know my own husband better than I do.”

  Jonathan leaned forward over his bent knees and toyed with the tab on his beer can. “You guys have always been into that. Knowing each other so well. Not that I’m an expert, seeing as I just broke up with yet another girlfriend, but…don’t you want to keep some things to yourself sometimes?”

  “What, like ‘I enjoy sex with men’?”

  “No, like little things. There are things it’s not deceitful to keep private. I mean, aren’t you allowed to have a bit of mystery still? Adam always makes those comments about you, like ‘I knew you were going to say that,’ or telling you how you’re going to react to something before you can react to it. It seems a little odd to me, to put so much emphasis on knowing everything there is to know about another person, as if they can never surprise you.”

  “A little odd? Thanks, Jonathan.”

  “Okay, not odd. But I do think it could get kind of stifling. Especially since it seems to me you never can know everything, anyway.”

  “I’ve never thought of it that way,” I said, hugging my knees to my chest. “Knowing each other like that…it’s always felt like one of the rewards of such a long relationship.”

  “It is. For sure. I just think it’s possible to take it a little too far. I notice it about you and Adam because sometimes it feels like he’s got you in a box. He was so shocked when you actually stood your ground about moving to Massachusetts.”

  “Is that how you saw it? That I stood my ground against him?”

  “Well…yeah,” he said, looking as if he already regretted the statement. “It was obvious that he didn’t want to go. He expected you to turn the job down so you guys could stay in New York.”

  “I don’t think it makes him a bad person that his preference would not have been to move three hours away from all his friends and family for his wife’s career.”

  “I didn’t say he was a bad person,” said Jonathan. “Especially since he did agree to move. What I’m saying is that I feel like Adam sees you as static. Like he wrote this four-hundred-page user’s manual for you a long time ago, and he gets uncomfortable when you do things that don’t show up in the index.”

  A plane roared across the sky on its way to LaGuardia while I mulled this over. “You’ve never mentioned this before,” I said.

  He shrugged, one firm shoulder shifting under his navy blue Apache Relay T-shirt. Jonathan always has the name of some band or another plastered across his chest, most of them Tennessee-based, because he’s as big a chauvinist about his home state’s music as he is about the food. “It was never my business. Still isn’t. But I figure if you guys are going to start over, then there’s probably more stuff you need to talk about than the fact that he likes guys and he cheated.”

  “You know what scares me?” I said, in a low voice. “I’m having a hard time envisioning how we could start over from here. If you’d asked me a month ago what I’d do if my husband cheated, I probably would have said I’d try to work through it. Adam and I have been together for so long, and built so much and shared so much…it would seem almost, I don’t know, reckless, to turn my back on all of that because of one terrible decision. I would have said I wouldn’t give up on us so easily. And a lot of me still feels like that. But every time I try to turn toward that, I keep coming back to this: I can never fully trust him again. And the fact that I can’t let go of that scares the shit out of me, Jonathan. I haven’t been by myself since I was sixteen years old. I wouldn’t even know what to do or how to be. I don’t know who I am without this relation
ship.”

  “I do,” he said without hesitation. “I’ve never even known you when you weren’t with him, but that doesn’t matter. There’s more than enough of you to stand on your own feet if you leave him. Way more than enough. I’m not worried about you at all.”

  I stared at him, sitting there on the roof with his ink-covered forearms looped around his knees and his hair lit up like embers by the late afternoon sun, and I started to cry. Because Jonathan knew me. And he loved me. Independent of himself, independent of Adam, he loved me as my very own person. Nothing on earth would ever make him want to erase me. And suddenly that was the most precious thing in the world.

  “Always seem to end up here,” I snuffled, when he wrapped his arms around me and tucked my forehead against his neck.

  “Ah, darlin’,” he sighed, and squeezed me tighter.

  And I don’t know why I did it, because all my reasons together still didn’t add up to one actual good one, but I guess people who’ve been emotionally ransacked aren’t known for making the sharpest decisions. So I did it. I kissed Jonathan.

  It was not a testing kiss, it was committed. I felt the prickle of his beard under my hands and the startling contrast of his soft lips against mine, and as I sank into it, his whiskey scent swirled into my brain, lulling me with its associations of safety and familiarity and total, utter trust.

  After a few breathless seconds, he pulled back from me, blue eyes drilling into mine.

  “Caroline? What’s going on?”

  “Um…everything?” I said, on a little trembling half laugh. “Please just let me…” Let me have this, I almost said. But I didn’t. Instead I inched my face closer to his again, lips parted, asking. Asking him to forget that I was still married, that he and I didn’t do this, that we never had, that I was breaching the cardinal rule of Caroline and Jonathan with no discussion or agreement, simply because I needed him.