It's About Your Husband

by Lauren Lipton

  Just like that, I’m done sobbing. And then I’m talking. Maybe it’s the wine. Maybe it’s more than that. For reasons I will never fully understand, I choose Steve to confide in, to share the story I’ve never told anyone, not from the beginning. The story begins with my father taking me for an eye examination during my senior year in high school.

  “Where was your mother?” Steve asks from below me on my footstool.

  “Joy? At one of her classes—Qigong or Taoist yoga or one of the self-actualization workshops she was always taking. I didn’t resent that she was rarely around, not then. I loved her for wanting to make herself a better person. What a joke.”

  It’s time to bug out my eyes again. Steve produces a tissue out of thin air and passes it over. The thought I must look awful runs through my mind before I forcibly eject it. I am entirely over what happened between us on July Fourth, and couldn’t care less about looking attractive for him. I blow my nose noisily.

  Steve hands me another tissue. I clutch it. He pats my arm. “I’m still listening if you want to talk about it.”

  I guess I do want to. It makes no sense, but Steve, to me, in this matter, is trustworthy. I clear my throat. “Anyway, this day—it was February seventh, I remember exactly—my dad took me to Dr. Lieberman and waited for me in the waiting room, and when it was over we were joking around because the doctor had given me some of those hideous disposable sunglasses, and I was saying, ‘Do these work with my outfit?’ But when we got outside, I tossed them in the garbage. There was no way I was putting them on. The doctor’s office was in a busy strip mall, and what if someone from school saw me in them? Is this boring you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Go on.”

  In the kitchen, Rocky picks himself off the floor. He wanders over to me and leans with a grunt against my ankles. It seems okay to keep going. “I wasn’t wearing the ugly doctor sunglasses and didn’t have my own, because I’d accidentally left them in my locker. So while my dad was searching around for the car, there I was behind him like this.” I hold my arm over my eyes. “Basically walking across a busy strip mall parking lot, off busy Ventura Boulevard, which is sort of like the Broadway of the San Fernando Valley, with my eyes shut.”

  “This sounds like something you would do.”

  “It was moronic. When my dad turned around and noticed, he told me to stop it. He insisted I open my eyes, which was just the height of irony, considering what happened next.”

  “Which was?”

  “I kind of pulled my head up and squinted in what I thought was my father’s direction, practically blind from the sun, and I saw . . .” The details of the scene are still vivid: I can remember how the spring haze had turned the sky white and diffused the sun’s light into a generalized glare that made everything stark and surreal. The painted lines on the parking lot had nearly worn away, so that the cars were all parked slightly off-center, some straddling two spaces. “I saw my mother. In this parking lot, on this random Monday afternoon. She was with a man I’d never seen in my life, standing very close to him, but not seeing me.”

  “She wasn’t expecting you to be there,” Steve says. “If you’re not looking for something or expecting something, it can be there in front of you, and your mind glosses right over it. It’s as if your brain can’t process the information so it ignores it.”

  “Did I ever tell you that?”

  “It’s a theory of mine. Go on.”

  I tell him about forcing myself not to shut my eyes again, watching my mother reach up and put her arms around this man, unfamiliar to me but clearly not to her, a tall man with a graying ponytail, in shorts and sandals; my eyes burning in pain as I watched him reach around her waist and pull her toward him, and waiting in dumb horror for the kiss I knew would come next, as sloppy and passionate as anything I’d beheld in the halls of Valley High. Then, with my insides twisting up into a tortured knot that would eventually come to be my constant companion, rushing over to see how my father was taking this—my kind, dutiful father in his studio-accountant suit, with his bad heart.

  “Oh, no,” Steve says quietly. “Did he have—”

  “Not right then.” My voice sounds cold. “The heart attack came eight months later. They’d split up. It was my first semester in college. He was gone before he reached the hospital.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thanks, me, too.” It’s brusque, but Steve can’t possibly expect all my self-protective detachment to melt away instantly just because the story has finally been told.

  “What did he do in the parking lot, when he saw your mother?”

  My armchair is soft and enveloping. My apartment is surprisingly cool. Yet I can’t seem to get comfortable. I try crossing my legs, lying sideways and throwing them both over the arm of the chair. I finally turn toward the wall and drape myself over the chair back. “He didn’t see her,” I say into the upholstery.

  He didn’t, I go on, because he wasn’t looking for her. He was focused on finding the car and making sure he got me safely into it before I walked blindly into traffic. He was already there, unlocking the doors, holding the passenger side open and reaching in for his own sunglasses on the dashboard, holding them out to me and calling to me to watch where I was going and get into the car.

  I put on his dark glasses and got in. Dad asked if I was feeling all right. He said I looked strange. “Like you’ve seen a ghost,” he said. “Dr. Lieberman didn’t put something in your eyedrops, did he?”

  I didn’t know what to do. I sat stupefied as he put the key in the ignition and the car came to life. I made myself turn and see what my mother was doing, but she and the ponytail man had disappeared. The entire incident had taken maybe five or six seconds, and I was already wondering if I’d seen it wrong, even knowing I hadn’t.

  I asked him, “Dad? Do you and Mom . . . Is there anything going on with you two?”

  Dad eased the car onto Ventura and accelerated north. At the stoplight, he slowed down to let another car into the left-turn lane ahead of him. “Do you mean, are we having problems?”

  I allowed myself to hope. Maybe he already knew. “Yes. You know, like, with your marriage.”

  All he did was smile at me. He said, “The only problem we’re dealing with is, how soon after Iris goes off to college can we rent out her room?”

  And I knew he had no idea.

  “I spent the rest of the evening in my room, listening to the Smiths on my Walkman and staring out at the backyard. I told my dad I wasn’t feeling well, which wasn’t a lie, and when my mother got home much later, I didn’t come out to say hello.”

  Steve still seems to be listening, and I tell him about how the next morning I tiptoed out of the house early. I sat in my car in the school parking lot until it was time to go in, and then after classes I drove up to Mulholland Drive, parked on the side of the road and looked out over the Valley until it got dark, and went home and straight into my room. I did that for two weeks until one night my father knocked on my door and asked, “Is there anything you need to tell me?”

  I told him I was busy studying for midterms.

  As it turns out, it was a lucky thing I’d gotten into college early-decision, because I pretty much bombed every test and term paper through the end of the year. My final report card was so dismal, I ended up being the only one of my friends who didn’t graduate with honors. All this time my father was trying as hard as he could to get me to open up. He even took me out for breakfast and asked if I was having love troubles. It was horrible. I wasn’t the one having love troubles; he was.

  “Where was your mom during all this?” Steve asks.

  “Going about her business. Acting exactly the same as always—oblivious and benevolent. Her behavior was so normal, I started doubting myself again. If it all had happened now, I would have followed her to catch her in the act.” It’s been months since I’ve done this much talking, and my throat is sandpapery. “With m
y spying talent, I probably would have accidentally run her over with my car.”

  Steve grins. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

  I manage a smile. “It is pretty pathetic. I’m the world’s most inept private eye.”

  “You’re not the best.”

  “Not the best? I’m the worst.”

  “But you’re plucky. Like a grown-up Nancy Drew. I like that about you, Iris. I liked it the first time I met you. Nobody else does things quite the way you do.” He picks up my water glass and hands it to me.

  “Um, thanks.”

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt you, if you feel like finishing your story.”

  I still do.

  It went on like that the entire summer, I continue, me hiding out in my room with the curtains drawn (good grief, much as I did this summer) and not taking calls from any of my friends. I was a high-school graduate with three whole months of freedom I couldn’t enjoy. All I could think about was my mother and that man with the stupid ponytail, and that my father was being made a fool of and I knew it and was too big a coward to do a thing about it.

  “Then finally, the night before my parents drove me to college, I couldn’t stand it anymore. My dad had gone out to get me toothpaste or something, and I was in my room packing the remainder of my clothes into boxes, and something came over me. I stomped into the kitchen. My mother was making herself coffee—this was before her macrobiotic diet—and I stormed in and blurted out, ‘I know what you’re up to!’

  “Joy was holding a coffee mug. I remember exactly which one, an old one of my dad’s, white with black letters that said ‘Accountants do it by the book.’ I thought she’d be afraid of me, but she looked emotionless, the way she always looked when I did something inappropriate. It was all those parenting books she’d read, where parents are never supposed to appear shocked or upset. That got me even madder, so I yelled, ‘You’re having an affair!’”

  I demonstrate for Steve how Joy arranged her face into the special concerned look she used when I’d get really angry. “Then she started talking. I had assumed she would deny it and had an answer ready. It was an ultimatum: Either you tell Dad or I will. She surprised me. Instead of pretending she didn’t know what I was talking about, she said as plain as can be, ‘I’ve fallen in love with someone.’” My voice cracks a little but Steve either doesn’t notice or doesn’t mind.

  “I wanted to grab my dad’s coffee mug and throw it at her. My teeth started chattering. I sat at the kitchen table and put my head down. Joy kept talking. She went on and on: She didn’t plan it to happen, and it had nothing to do with how much she loved me, as if I were a first-grader who thought this was my fault. She said she’d been a good wife to my father for nineteen years, and ‘now, it’s my time to be selfish.’ She said she still cared for my dad but wasn’t in love with him anymore. Just when I was about to start crying, my dad’s car came up the driveway. I couldn’t face him and got up to run into my room. Before leaving the kitchen, I told Joy I never wanted to speak to her again. To this day, I never really have. The next day, all the way to Pomona, I didn’t say more than ten words to either of them, and when my dad went to hug me good-bye, I just—”

  I’m about to lose the battle with the tears.

  “—I pulled away. A month later, Joy finally broke the news to him, and he moved into an awful condo in Woodland Hills, and then a few months after that, he was gone.”

  I start crying again, but Steve looks neither horrified nor disgusted; living with Vickie must be good practice in dealing with unchecked female emotion. The thought of Vickie makes me cry harder. But I’m so far into my story now that I might as well finish the last little bit.

  “The worst of it,” I sob, “the worst thing of all was, I never did tell him the whole story. I kept planning to but never found the courage. He died not even knowing I was as big a liar as she was.”

  Steve says quietly, “It wasn’t your place to do that. It was their problem, between the two of them.”

  A fresh burst of hot tears courses down my cheeks.

  “They needed to find their own way,” Steve goes on. “I’ve learned that from this . . .” he gropes for the word. “. . . From this adventure we’ve all been having, you and me and Vickie. Husbands and wives have problems. They all do. In the end each has to take responsibility for his or her contribution to those problems and to decide together, like adults, whether to keep trying or to move on.”

  The Elixir I put on after my shower runs into my eyes and stings them. Steve gives up handing me individual Kleenexes and just forks over the box.

  “You and I have some things to talk about,” he says. “Maybe now isn’t the right time, but there’s a lot I need to tell you. Very soon, because the longer things go on like this the less I’ll be able to forgive myself.” He looks very odd. His eyes are intent and his mouth is turned down at the corners, as if he has finally understood that infidelity isn’t a victimless crime. “That was quite a story, Iris,” he adds.

  There’s no excuse for what happens next.

  My mother had a dozen for what she did to my dad and me. That partnerships are meant to dissolve when the partners’ work together is complete. That change, though painful, is part of becoming whole. That it is our spirit, not our rational mind, that chooses whom to love—to name a few. Even if I could make myself believe these things, I know I’ll only be hurt, badly, when what’s done is done and Steve finally says what’s on his mind: He’s committed to working things out with Vickie and owes it to his marriage, or however he’ll choose to phrase it. It also violates every rule I have ever set for myself and is so counter to my “sense of Irisness” that never, ever would I have thought myself capable. It will hurt a friend who doesn’t deserve to be hurt. It will hurt my husband. It will forever change the way I view myself. It’s the most despicable act I can think of, made even worse because it binds me, in its selfishness and dishonesty, to the one person whose actions I find unforgivable. Yet for the first time in my life I can’t hear my little voice saying shouldn’t, mustn’t, don’t. I feel utterly incapable of doing the right thing.

  For the first time in my life I don’t want to.

  I slide to the edge of my armchair, lean forward, and kiss Vickie Benjamin Sokolov’s husband on the mouth.

  There’s nothing tentative about it. My lips part with his, my tongue finds his, and I crush myself to him as if he belonged only to me.

  He doesn’t back away.

  But he doesn’t surrender. Not entirely. He holds his arms at his sides and keeps his back straight—a response that, at any other time and from any other man, would send me crawling away in shame. With Steve, I am emboldened, slipping my hands under his shirt and grazing his back and chest with my fingertips and kissing him fearlessly, ravenously, until his breathing quickens and his skin burns and at last he lets me pull the shirt up and over his head. I take his hands in mine and pull him from the footstool onto the armchair, on top of me. When I move my lips down the side of his neck, he tastes of salt and smells of sweat and sunlight and cut grass.

  “Please,” I whisper.

  He kisses me back then, pressing his mouth against mine and covering my body with his, and I know he wants the same thing I do and wants it now, here, whether it’s right or not, if only for this moment.

  “We shouldn’t,” he breathes.

  “I don’t care.”

  “You’ve been drinking.”

  “I’m fine now.” I tug at the elastic waist of his running shorts.

  “This isn’t right.”

  “Shh.” The talk will come all too soon, but for this moment he is mine. I slip down farther underneath him, my lips moving down his chest and torso.

  He stops talking.

  He also stands up.

  My heart constricts.

  But he isn’t leaving me this time, either. Instead he takes my hands in his and helps me to my feet. “Watch that footstool,” he whispers. “It’s a killer.”

/>   I laugh.

  He does, too, curling his arms around me. Then he leads me to the bed—two steps—and in an instant we’re lying together, face to face, pulling off each other’s clothes, touching and tasting each other, slippery with sweat from the hot August day and from desire.

  “Wait.” I reach behind me frantically, feeling for my nightstand drawer and groping inside for a condom. “Could you?”

  He takes it, kisses me again, unwraps it, and puts it on.

  And then we’re entwined, wrapped around each other, my fingers pressing into the muscles in his back, pulling him in closer, deeper. I realize my eyes are open and I’m watching his face, in a way I’ve never been able to do with any man, not even my own husband. It surprises me, as does the intensity with which Steve returns my gaze. It feels intimate. Soul mates, I think, and giggle before I can stop myself.

  “What?” Steve asks, tracing my lips.

  “I’m just not used to this.”

  “Me neither,” he answers quietly, moving his hands down, caressing and exploring my body until I no longer care what he meant, which part of this he’s not used to; until the light begins to radiate outward, gathering and gaining strength and heat and then, at last, exploding high above us, fireworks sparking and flaring and drifting back down like stardust.

  Afterward, he stays on top of me, his heart against mine, our breathing slowly returning to normal.

  “Am I crushing you?” he murmurs into my neck.

  “No. Don’t ever move.” I hold him tight, sliding my hands along the length of his spine, until it occurs to me that he actually is crushing me. “Maybe you should move,” I gasp, this time because I can’t breathe.

  He rolls himself off me and then pulls me on top of him. “That better?”