Mating for Life

by Marissa Stapley

  She held her breath.

  “Ilsa.”

  “Yes?”

  “Have a drink with me at least? I must see you.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  • • •

  They went to a dark, wood-paneled pub. It seemed like a mistake, to be out in public together in such a small town.

  “You have a Mona Lisa smile,” he said to her. And she thought, That’s one of the most trite things I have ever heard a man say. It was a line he probably used on other women, too. She pushed the thought away and showed her teeth the next time she smiled.

  He was attentive, different than she had ever seen him. Sweet, even. This is when he falls in love with me, she thought, and started to relax and allow room for relief. He was going to fall in love with her. Maybe it would be easy. But even if he falls in love with you, what will you do? Ilsa didn’t know, but still clung to the comfort of her thoughts.

  As if to confirm what she was feeling, he said, “Your eyes are amazing, what color are they, I can never remember.” To which she replied, with insouciance that felt too studied, “Gray? Blue? They’re always changing.” He smiled like she had said something brilliant; his foot was out of his shoe and nestled against her calf. They talked about nothing, about everything, about childhood and family and her, a lot about her. How her art was going, what she had been doing. He said he had missed her.

  Later, he excused himself to go to the restroom and it was twenty minutes before he returned to their table. She watched him, pausing at a table, not just nodding and smiling at the people who had noticed him, but stopping and talking, having a conversation that seemed to her to be unnecessarily long. She felt irritated and hot. The half glass of wine she had allowed herself had upset her stomach. She waited and tried to maintain a sexy, alluring pose, crossed her legs, uncrossed them, sat this way and that, grew tired of it, slumped a little, then sat up and crossed her legs again at just the right moment; rare, lucky timing.

  She wondered who the people, who now were watching him and talking to each other as he walked away, thought she was—for she was clearly not his blond-gray, birdlike wife, the one who so often appeared alongside him in the society pages, who had been with him that night at the party.

  Whoever they thought Ilsa was, at that moment she knew with clarity that if they suspected she was his lover, they would judge her, not him. She felt resentful of this.

  His mood had changed. “Have you had enough yet?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Shall we go to your studio?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  “I just . . . I don’t want to. Tonight I just want to sit here and talk.”

  “We’ve been talking.” He sounded tired. She sat looking at him. “Fine. What do you want to talk about?”

  She thought for a moment. “Do you think we were meant to meet? Do you ever think it was . . . destined?” She realized how stupid she sounded, how girlish, and wished she could rewind the words back into her mouth, the way her mother would have tried to do.

  His expression was disinterested. “I don’t know, maybe,” he said vaguely. “I try not to think too much about fate.” His eyes were roaming the room, but returned to her, intense once again. “You have secrets, don’t you? Tell me some of them. If we’re going to sit here and talk, you might as well make it interesting for me.” He leaned in.

  She felt like she was in shock. She shook her head slightly. She felt the anger she had been trying to suppress surface and begin to simmer. She thought about saying it, saying, I’m pregnant, and I know it’s yours because my husband and I never have sex. She imagined that his expression probably wouldn’t change very much. Then she thought of how she had felt that night at Fiona’s party, when he had watched her, his unwavering gaze like a dim spotlight. Wherever she moved around the yard that night, the beam had swung along with her.

  “I do have a secret,” she said. “You were right that night, about me being a bored housewife.”

  “I don’t know that I ever said that—”

  “I never should have married my husband. It was a mistake.”

  “Everyone thinks that. It’s because marriage is a mistake. But it’s a necessary evil. Don’t fight it, my dear. You are where you are.”

  She ignored him. “I only married him because—because I came back from France heartbroken, because my first husband betrayed me and made me feel like it was what I wanted, and then . . . I came to visit my sister Fiona, to see her kids, and I met Tim, and I thought I was in love with him. Or maybe I was in love with him. Who knows? Being in love doesn’t mean anything anyway. It’s fleeting, all hormones.”

  “So young to be so jaded.”

  “I zeroed in on him and decided I wanted him. Because he was so good and so safe, and because Fiona—well, she seemed so content, so untouchable. I wanted to be untouchable, too.”

  “Now, this is interesting,” Lincoln said, and Ilsa wanted to reach across the table and slap him, watch as her wedding ring left a welt on his cheek. “What happened? Tim couldn’t resist you, right? Who could? Especially years ago. I bet you were even more tantalizing when you were young.”

  She gripped the table to keep her hand down. “Of course he resisted. Because he’s Tim. He is good. He’s probably the best man on earth. He said such lovely things to me, too, and of course they made me love him even more, at least for a time. Then I met Michael, and I thought I had my solution. Not Tim, but similar. Similar enough. I finally stopped dreaming about Tim, stopped wanting to stay in bed all day just to have the feeling of being with him, even if it wasn’t real. In Michael I thought maybe I’d found a substitute, that I could have the safe, perfect life my sister had, and be safe and perfect, too, and freed from . . . from who I really am. And from people like you.” She reached across the table now and picked up Lincoln’s hand, which was limp. She dropped it back on the table, where it landed with a soft thump, like he was a corpse already and not just an aging man. “I need to go home,” she said.

  He lowered his eyebrows. His hand was still in a dead-­looking pile on the table. “Very well. I trust you can hail yourself a taxi.”

  And that was that.

  • • •

  “How was the gallery opening?” Michael had asked Ilsa when she got home. He was on his way up the stairs, but he turned.

  “Fine.” She looked up at him, forced herself to meet his gaze. “Fiona isn’t doing Thanksgiving this year, so I told Tim to bring himself and the boys here for dinner.”

  “Okay,” he said, not commenting on how odd it was that Fiona wasn’t hosting this year. He continued up the stairs, then stopped again. “Hey. I have to ask you something.” He walked down the stairs and picked up four envelopes from the side table. “Is this some kind of mistake? Did you adopt four children? There’ve been a lot of charges on the credit card. ”

  “I . . . it must be a mistake. I’ll call them tomorrow.”

  “There are a few other things for you,” he said, and she stood and studied his face, holding the letters he had handed her.

  “Do you want to stay up and . . . have a glass of wine with me?” she asked.

  “I really shouldn’t. I have a seven a.m. meeting tomorrow.” He turned and started walking up the stairs, his footsteps creaking in all the same places as usual.

  “Michael?” she called. I’m no longer following your unwavering path through our existence. I’ve gone off the rails and am potentially heading toward some sort of impact and you haven’t even noticed.

  The creaking stopped. “Yes?”

  She walked to the bottom of the stairs and held out the envelopes. “I lied. I’m sorry.”

  “About what?”

  “It wasn’t a mistake. I was up late one night and I couldn’t sleep and got stuck on an infomercial and there were all thos
e children with the flies crawling all over their heads, and there was one, she was Ani’s age, and she had flies crawling across her eyeballs . . .” Ilsa took a deep breath, gulped in air. It felt like confession, this. She now understood what her father had been talking about, why he went into those confessional booths, performed such sacrilege. “So I adopted three at once, and then called back the next night to adopt one more,” she finished. As my penance, she did not add.

  He peered down at her, his eyes barely visible behind his glasses, which were reflecting the light from the lamp at the bottom of the stairs. My silver fox, she used to call him. Now he spoke in a paternal tone. “But, Ilsa, it’s a bit unreasonable, don’t you think? Two hundred dollars a month . . .”

  “It’s not as though we can’t afford it,” she said.

  “What do you know about what we can afford?”

  “I’ll sell paintings.”

  “And this is how you want to spend the money from your paintings?”

  “It’s my money.” She felt like a sullen child. “I’ll spend it in any way I want.”

  “Your choice,” he said, and turned, continued creaking up the stairs.

  “Michael, please. Just wait.”

  He turned. She took off her shoes and met him in the middle of the staircase. She kissed him and he kissed her back, but she sensed hesitation. When did this happen to us?

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I miss you. I miss us.” But this wasn’t true and she knew it. What she really missed was herself. Still, she kissed him again.

  “Let’s go to bed,” she said.

  • • •

  The next morning, he rolled over in bed and slung a leg across her body.

  She got out of the bed and went to the bathroom, turned the shower on, hot.

  She had been in the shower five minutes when she heard the bathroom door open. She thought for a moment that it was Ani, up early and needing to pee, but when she realized it was Michael, she felt irrationally annoyed.

  He pulled aside the curtain. “Morning.” He squeezed into the small shower. She had conditioner on her hair and was exfoliating her legs and she smiled back but with gritted teeth as she moved out of the stream of water and stood in the cool air while he began to wash his hair.

  “Got to make that early meeting,” he said. “That was fun last night.” And a wink.

  She rinsed her hair and her legs. “I’m done. Enjoy.”

  “You okay?”

  “Just tired.”

  She got out of the shower and wrapped a towel around her head and one around her body, then looked at herself through the steam forming on the mirror. She blinked a few times, reached for her eye cream on a shelf, and patted away the stinging.

  10

  Eastern Coyote (Canis latrans)

  In general, mated pairs of coyotes are monogamous and packs consist of close family members. This need for a dedicated mate exists in part because of the high demands the pups place on their parents; most are born in large litters and require an extended period of training and care to learn to hunt and survive. Sometimes, however, coyotes practice polygyny, and two females raise pups with one male in one den—but this is rare.

  It seemed later than it was—because the glass of wine Helen had ordered to her room had made her drowsy and she had tried to write and then eventually given up, made tea, felt officially ancient, and crawled into bed—when the phone rang.

  “Hello,” said an unfamiliar voice. “My name is Iris McKellah and I’m calling about Fiona Sherman. She has you listed here as her emergency contact.”

  Helen felt a shock of fear, instant, numbing. Her sleepiness evaporated instantly. She thought, I’ve waited so long for a call like this about one of my children that I forgot I was waiting. “What happened? Is she . . . hurt?” Unthinkable, the other option. No, she couldn’t be. Not Fiona. Never Fiona. She was the strong one.

  “Well, not exactly. I mean, she’s hurting, yes. But she’s not hurt, not physically.”

  “I’m confused,” said Helen.

  “I run the Crystal Springs Body Mind Spirit Retreat and Spa here in Neversink, New York, where Fiona is currently a guest. She checked herself in yesterday afternoon.”

  “Checked herself in? Is it . . . a rehab center?” Then Helen laughed. Of course not. Fiona wasn’t in rehab. “Good lord,” she said to herself, before realizing you couldn’t talk to yourself when you were actually on the phone with another person.

  “Oh, no, not a rehab center. A place where women seek positive change, so perhaps you could call it a life rehab. I own it, and am also the chief chakra and aura therapist.” Helen could picture Iris. She was likely wearing several multicolored scarves and earrings made of feathers or some repurposed, recycled material. (Probably very similar to the ones Helen herself usually wore.)

  “Are you sure you have the right Fiona Sherman?”

  “I can’t imagine how there could have been a mix-up.”

  “And what’s wrong with her? Is she sick?”

  “I did a reading this morning—Angel Cards—and was told she needed external help. A friend, I assumed, although one of the cards also suggested sisters. She doesn’t seem open to making any friends here, though, and especially not sister friends, so I thought . . . well, you are a friend of hers, aren’t you? She put you down as the person to call in case of an emergency.”

  “Well,” said Helen, and then wasn’t sure how to continue. Well, I’m not exactly her friend. And I don’t think she likes me most of the time. I always wanted to be her friend, though. That was my goal, when I became a mother to her—my first baby, so beautiful, so stoic, so different from me—to be a friend instead of just a typical mother. I failed at that, with Fiona at least, but I really did try. “I’m her mother,” she said.

  “I see. Do you think it might be possible for you to come out here for a few nights? I won’t charge you, of course. Fiona has a large room. You can stay in there. It seems the only answer. Are you able to?”

  Helen looked around her hotel room, at the papers and the clothes and the wineglass and the tea mug. She had checked into the Chelsea, but it was just a stop among many. Over the summer, she’d also visited San Diego, Paris, Toronto, and an old friend in Munich. Then fall had arrived and she had decided she would hole up and finally write her memoirs because Edie had done it, written all those things about her in her memoir that only sold because Edie was Nate’s wife and Helen’s friend. Maybe she’d stay for a week. That would be enough to get a good start. And, she decided, she’d write it all by hand, the way she used to write her songs.

  Except that memoirs weren’t songs. And it was just easier to write on a computer. Not having brought one, Helen felt stymied rather than inspired. “Yes, I’ll come.”

  “And are you far from here?”

  “I’m in New York City at the moment.”

  “It’s only about a two-hour drive.” Iris said it as though it were as simple as driving around the corner to pick up eggs. And maybe it could be that simple. Your daughter needs you, so you go.

  It was just that Helen couldn’t come to terms with the fact that Fiona needed anyone. It was making her feel helpless. “How do I get there?” she asked.

  “There are directions on our website.”

  “I don’t have a computer with me here,” she said, feeling embarrassed.

  Iris recited directions, and Helen wrote them down. “See you soon,” she said, and hung up.

  All summer, Helen had felt like something was missing. She had been afraid that that something was Iain, whom she had been trying hard to convince herself she didn’t miss. But she now realized what the hole was: it was the girls she missed. All of them together, warts and all. She’d seen them, yes, had visited them all, but they had not all been together at once. She thought about the last time she had seen Fiona, during an early fall visit t
o Rye. She hadn’t seemed like herself, but Helen had thought perhaps it was early menopause. She’d had it early, too. It was the likely explanation, Helen reassured herself now, and this Iris just didn’t realize.

  But still, it was an opportunity. She needed to seize it.

  • • •

  “Ilsa?”

  “Hi, Mom.” There was a clatter in the background.

  “You sound busy. Should I call you back?”

  “I’m cooking. Thanksgiving dinner.” There was another clatter, and a sigh. “Although it’s not going that well.”

  “What are you making?”

  “I was trying to re-create Fiona’s menu. Huge mistake. Do you have any idea how high-maintenance chestnuts are?”

  “I’m calling because I think I need you. Correction: Fiona needs you.” She explained about Iris’s call. “I don’t know if there’s really anything wrong with her, but I thought we might as well go and check it out. It seems like a good chance for all of us to be together, since our early summer weekend was such a bust this year. I’m calling Liane next. If I can pry her away from her brand-new knight in shining armor—who is an absolute doll, by the way—I can use my points to fly her down. And I called Iris back to see if we could get our own room and she said of course. She loves the idea of all of us coming. Although I suppose if you’re doing Thanksgiving dinner, you can’t . . .”

  There was a sound like a spoon and pot banging into the sink. “I’m officially not cooking any longer,” Ilsa said decisively. “Tim and Michael can handle it. Or they can take the kids to the football game at the high school and eat hot dogs. At this point I really don’t care. I’m just not a traditional feast type of girl, it turns out. So how do I get there? Should we meet somewhere first?”

  “I think you’re about an hour and a half away and I’m two.”

  “Let’s just both start driving and see who gets there first.”

  “Road trip!” Helen said, but Ilsa didn’t laugh.