“This is not a good idea,” he said.
I shook my head no.
“Your head is spun around every which way, honey. You know that.”
I nodded.
“You still want me to kiss you.”
“I need to feel wanted,” I whispered. And it was okay, somehow, to let Jonathan see me that pitiful, because I couldn’t imagine I’d ever trust another man this much again. Frankly, I didn’t even care whether it was genuine desire or just friendship and pity that pulled him toward me, as long as he came.
“Care…”
“Please?”
He swallowed, then frowned. And then, sighing with something like relinquishment or acceptance or maybe both, he kissed me, one hand coming to rest on my hair like a butterfly landing on a leaf. I fitted my hands around his shoulders and leaned in to take everything he’d offer.
The air around us growled as a block’s worth of air conditioners strained against the summer afternoon warmth. The kiss started out tentative but quickly intensified as his fingers sank deeper into my hair, and his other hand drifted up to cup the side of my throat, nudging me closer as he drank me up. It was such a weird mix of familiarity and strangeness, comfort and wrongness, that my neurons were firing in blaring, blurry confusion for no clear reason they could decide on. God damn, Jonathan is an incredible kisser was followed by Of course he is and then Wait, why the hell am I kissing Jonathan?, and then he pulled away.
“Care, this is bad,” he muttered, wrist to his lips to brush away the dampness from the kiss. “This shouldn’t be happening.”
I wanted to pound my fists and drum my heels against the warm roof like a toddler in a tantrum.
“I’m serious. This is not the answer to anything. This is not right.”
I must have looked as on the verge of a meltdown as I felt, because he sighed and cupped the back of my neck, drawing our foreheads together.
“Caroline. Honey. If things were different, I could have kissed you all day. You are beautiful, and desirable, and all of that stuff. I think Adam has lost his damn mind. But you are married to him, and whatever you decide, you have to work this out without dragging me into it. You and I are more than that.”
“But you kissed me too.”
“I know. I wanted to. I can’t pretend I wasn’t curious. Been curious for fifteen years. But I shouldn’t have. We shouldn’t have.”
“I’m not trying to drag you into it. I just—”
“I get it,” he said softly. “I really do. But this isn’t the answer.”
“I knoooow,” I groaned, smushing my palms against my face. “I just needed something to make this hurt less.”
One corner of his lips tucked up slightly into his cheek. He didn’t even have to say the words, they were written all over his face. The words said, Girl, there is no damn such thing.
•
When I got home, late that night, I walked straight upstairs to the bathroom I shared with Adam, stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the door, and removed my clothes. When they were gone, I squared my feet to the mirror, shoved my shoulders back, and looked.
And immediately realized I had no idea what the hell I was looking for. Oh yes, I see it clearly now; he slept with a guy because my thighs had gotten just a little bit too plump. No. My body had been more or less the same overstatedly feminine shape for as long as Adam had known me. He liked to say I looked like a lady from a pre-Raphaelite painting: copious hair, rounded limbs—and, I assume, if one could peep under the maidens’ petticoats—pronounced hips, a fluffy soufflé of a tummy, and breasts that had to be hidden under button-downs to avoid stares. The small sconces on either side of the mirror bathed my pale skin in a warm, diffuse glow. What I saw was…pretty.
Sexuality is a continuum—that’s what we learned in my sophomore year sociology class. It was rarely as simple as checking one box or the other on the survey. But in my experience, every bisexual person I knew was a woman. The men I knew had checked their boxes with conviction and enthusiasm, and they did not tiptoe outside those four conjoining lines. So, then, did that make Adam a unicorn? Or did it make him a man who’d been lying to himself for at least the past seventeen years? Whichever it was, he clearly wasn’t going to tell me.
My eyes drifted over to the towel rack by the door, where Adam’s towel still hung next to mine. It was one of my little weaknesses, that towel of Adam’s. Such a dumb thing, but I liked it there. As if he still lived here, but was just away for a little while. As if he might come home at any moment, and step up behind me while I was brushing my teeth, and wrap his arms around me and kiss the side of my head.
God, how I missed being held. I missed the affectionate warmth of Adam’s presence, the pleasure of slipping in and out of conversation with him as we moved through our days. Even the most mundane exchanges with Adam could turn into laughter with each new breath he took. It had only been two weeks, but I hadn’t been apart from him for so long since college. Add in the fact that we weren’t speaking—that everything between us was ruined and wrong—and his absence felt as if a part of my body had been ripped away, leaving the rest of me pulsing and raw. I kept telling myself that one way or another, it would all heal eventually, because that’s what you have to tell yourself. I knew it was true. There was no other alternative.
But I wasn’t looking forward to enduring it. And, even once I could crawl a little closer to normal, I wasn’t looking forward to the scars.
9
•
I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way.
—Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, January 21, 1926
“So how’d it go with Adam yesterday?”
I crashed into wakefulness as Ruby’s hundred and thirty-odd pounds abruptly collided with my body, one pointy elbow propelling itself into my boob. You’ve seen those YouTube videos of dogs waking up sleeping owners by vaulting onto their beds and pawing at them until they surface? Welcome to my sister.
“You are a terrible human being,” I mumbled, pushing up on my elbows and scrubbing my face to try to scatter the sleep. “And I didn’t see Adam.”
“So what the hell were you doing there, then?”
Interrogating witnesses and making bad decisions. “I saw Patrick,” I said, too morning-raw to lie. And too hungover with creeping, crawling shame to share the way I’d hit on Jonathan.
“Oh shit,” she said, eyes alert with interest. “Did you rip him a new one?”
“Jesus, you’re bloodthirsty. No. I did not. I was trying to find out more about him and Adam, and all I found out is that he’s in love with my husband.”
“Hmm,” she said.
“Yeah,” I sighed. The strangest thing was, though, that when I thought about Patrick now, woven in with all the hurt and the possessive rage there was a thread of sympathy. And even one of kinship. Adam was an incredibly easy person to fall in love with.
The man I’d married had this gift, unlike anyone else I knew, of listening like you were the most fascinating person he’d ever met. And it wasn’t only me—I’d seen it more times than I could count, over the years, the way Adam converted strangers into friends before I’d barely struggled past “What do you do for a living?” He was fascinated by other people and their stories. And if he couldn’t learn, he would invent. At bars, parties, any activity where we were trapped with a group of strangers for a length of time, Adam had to name everyone. A look-alike, or a new nickname. He loved to draw me into it, and together we would embroider stories: these strangers’ secret pasts, illegitimate children, private disappointments.
Our downstairs neighbor at the Hell’s Kitchen apartment, Gregor, was obsessed with the regulation of all things in the apartment building. We sometimes had to borrow the building’s ladder to change a lightbulb in our ten-foot ceiling, and if the ladder was not back in its assigned spot in the basement w
ithin a few hours, all the owners would get an email from Gregor inquiring about its return. His affinity for the ladder tortured Adam.
“Why does he need it there every single day? What does he do with it? Does he store his toothpaste on top of his kitchen cabinets?”
In an attempt to forestall Gregor’s anxiety, Adam took to notifying him when we were borrowing it. So instead, Gregor simply addressed his concern directly to us, in the courtliest language imaginable: “Dearest Adam. Could you kindly return the ladder to the basement at your earliest convenience. Sincerely yours, Gregor.”
One night, we received one of these messages on our way back from dinner at our favorite Italian place, with almost two bottles of pinot grigio sloshing around inside us. Adam, fevered with wine, paused in the hallway outside Gregor’s door.
“Adam!” I giggled. “What are you doing?”
“I just want to know why,” he stage-whispered back to me, raising his arm to knock. “It’s eating me alive.”
“Don’t!” I squeaked, tugging his arm, but he swayed toward the door, chest puffing with laughter.
“Gregor,” he called, in a wheedling sing-song. “Oh, Gregor…”
“Stop!” I said as a sliver of light showed under the door. “Seriously, let’s go!”
“Gregor!”
Finally I got my arm over his shoulder and clapped my hand over his mouth, while he struggled, bellowing incoherently into my palm. And that is how Gregor found us when he swung open the door of his apartment: freeze-framed in guilty surprise, like teenagers caught toilet-papering a mailbox.
“Can I help you?” he said, looking from Adam to me and back again.
Any responses I might have been able to summon were popping like soap bubbles over my head, but Adam rallied and shoved my limp hand away from his mouth.
“The ladder,” he said. “We wanted to advise you that we will return it on the morrow. You have our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience.” Then he clipped his arm to his waist and sketched a solemn little half bow.
Gregor blinked, then did the same. “Good evening.”
“And to you, sir,” said Adam.
When the door clicked shut, we gaped at each other for a moment until I spotted the mirth quivering in his lips. “Go!” I hissed, shoving him toward the staircase before the laughter erupted, but he barely made it to the second floor landing before it was rolling out of him, deep and generous like Adam’s laughter always was. When we shut our door behind us, he was wiping moisture from his eyes.
“On the morrow,” I mimicked in a quasi-British falsetto. “Kind sir, we shall return it to thee anon, before the setting of the sun….”
Still chuckling, he cupped my face and kissed me. “I still have so many questions!” he whispered. “Is it part of his religion? Is he a ladder worshipper? Does he rise at dawn every day and pray to the ladder? Does he—”
I cut him off with a kiss.
Like I said: an easy person to love. But falling in love was the easy part; the work was in staying there. Feeding it and renewing it, even in the moments when his childishness or self-absorption drove me to the edge of my very last nerve. Digging in to keep our sights trained on forever—that was my job.
•
At work, I’d been avoiding thinking about my doomed-to-fail Diana Ramirez mission, but all of a sudden I was running into Neil Crenshaw constantly. Of course, he’d always been around; but as I grew itchily aware that I had devoted precisely zero consideration to how I might approach, let alone secure money from, this busy and in-demand woman I was fairly certain detested me, I swear to god I saw the man everywhere. Always with the same friendly, encouraging smile on his face.
“How’s it going, Caroline?” he said, strolling into the kitchenette a few days later, while I was waiting for my burritos to finish in the microwave. (Like most of the food Ruby had gotten me hooked on over the past week and a half, they were disgusting yet delicious.) “Any thoughts on how to tackle Diana?”
Thankfully, the microwave timer chose that exact moment to ding, so I occupied myself with retrieving my freshly unthawed lunch rather than meeting his eyes. “Um, it’s going okay. I’ve been tossing around a couple of ideas, but they’re not quite ready yet.”
“I’m looking forward to hearing them,” he said.
I angled a quick look at him. Was that the faintest current of arch humor I caught in his voice? As if he suspected the only ideas I’d been tossing concerned how best to bounce Diana lightly but firmly back into the development office’s court?
But his face was interested, so I bobbed my head briskly to demonstrate my seriousness. “Great. Let me chew on it a little more and then I’ll touch base with you once I’ve got enough to discuss.”
“Sounds good,” he said. “And don’t feel weird about doing this. Remember what Warhol said.”
“ ‘Business art is the step that comes after art.’ Yes. I remember.”
“Good. Then I don’t have to bore you with the rest of it,” he said, smiling, and stepped aside to let me and my burritos escape.
•
When I got home from work that afternoon, a sheaf of bills awaited me in the mailbox, along with the fall Boden catalog and another letter from Adam. I am aware that no one enjoys receiving bills, but for me, they have always been akin to mosquitos who brazen their way indoors: I cannot relax until they are dealt with. I think it’s a holdover from my teenage years: the stack of envelopes in the wicker tray on our brown-tiled kitchen counter that grew and grew until the envelopes started sliding off the top. The tense conversations my parents never quite managed to keep as hushed as they intended; the words I overheard, like lien and repossession. These days, my bills are paid and filed the day I receive them, so I never have to think about them again.
I headed to the office and opened a window while I waited for the computer to boot up. This ancient desktop, propped on a small table in the corner, was for my use, but the room was mostly Adam’s. I hadn’t been in here since the day he came to see me, because it was all just too him: the large double bookcases groaning with his favorite reads; the smaller one crammed with his old Moleskine notebooks; the heavy antique oak desk his father had given him, at which Theodore had written his Pulitzer-winning novel. He had hoped the juju of the artifact would transfer to his son; Adam had hoped it even more. Thus far, the desk had not performed.
The notebooks seemed to pulse in my peripheral vision as if they were possessed. Adam had never really used them as personal journals; they were mainly for jotting down ideas and scene sketches, that sort of thing, but—what if? What if he’d broken his own self-established protocol and written about his affair? He’d written a few things about me from time to time, at moments of particular intensity. The thought that Adam’s feelings for Patrick might have warranted exploration in his notebooks was like someone shattering a glass inside my chest.
I rolled my chair over and tapped my finger on the top edge of the last notebook, the most recent. When I tugged on it, it fell into my hand easily, softly, as if it wanted me to read it. Dread churned inside me as I began to leaf through the pages, each new expanse of paper a spray of bird shot that might knock my soft little dove of a heart out of the sky.
But in spite of my terror, there was nothing besides what belonged there: Adam’s work, his ideas. Snippets of observation (Interesting couple: the woman is a curvy rockabilly with blunt red bangs and colorful tattoo sleeves; the guy a pinched, accountant type shaped like a green bean) and dialogue (Texting girl giggles, “Whoops, my finger slipped”; cryogenic corporate mom next to her whispers “That’s what he said”). There were no confessions, no allusions, no personal entries at all. There was no Patrick. He might have meant something to Adam, but he hadn’t meant more than me.
High on relief, I ran my fingers along the row of notebook spines on the shelf above: These were the journals from his high school and college years. I pulled another book toward me, the one that covered the spring and early
summer leading up to our wedding day. One of the entries about me was in this volume. My fingers found the page immediately.
A letter I will never send to Caroline, he had written at the top of the page. And yet, he’d showed it to me. Partly because he wanted to share the emotion with me, and partly because he was too proud of the writing to leave it trapped unread within the pages of his notebook.
My girl, soon to be my wife…
I can scarcely believe it. Not because I doubted you, or doubted us, but because I’m in awe. In awe of this tremendous, breathtaking good fortune of mine. It’s impudent, this luck. Impudent to have found a love like this, so young, and for it to have grown such deep and powerful roots in the unpromising soil of high school and college.
I stopped reading, laughter bubbling out of me like spring water. It was such a clean and welcome feeling to laugh without malice at something related to Adam. Because here was the thing: If I pointed out to him, even now in the midst of everything else, that he had used a metaphor concerning soil in two significant pieces of writing regarding me—this journal entry, and the letter he gave me after I discovered his affair—he would go maroon with embarrassment. Adam hated to reuse ideas, phrases, and so forth; his mind, according to him, should be a constantly rejuvenated thing, renewed by fresh turns of phrase never before assembled. The obsession could get tedious (Ruby teased him for it mercilessly), but it was so Adam.
All of a sudden, I missed him so badly it felt like all the air had been vacuumed out of my chest.
“Sweetheart!” The naked relief in Adam’s voice when he picked up the phone made my eyes sting with tears, because I felt it too. “Talk to me,” he said. And I was ready to. I was so damn glad to hear his voice.
“So, I read your letter. The one you gave Jonathan.”
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