“But you’re happy?” By which, of course, I mean, Is this the point where we both start pretending you haven’t spent the last few years confiding your adulterous fantasies?
“Children are so life-affirming!” Mark says. “That moment when you bring home a newborn from the hospital, all tiny and wrapped in a blanket. You think, Jesus, everyone in the world was once this young, floating on a tide of parental love and hope. That’s before they turn into teenage assholes.”
It’s hard not to wonder if it’s really babies Mark loves, or if it’s more that he’s sentimental for the last time there were babies in his house—for when he was younger and his marriage was fresher. I am not, however, enough of a jerk to ask.
I’ve been running in place, and when he joins me, we head east. He adds, “Besides, she’s the one who’ll have to get up for most of the night feedings.”
* * *
—
I knew already; she told me, via email, two months ago.
She wrote, So I’m pregnant. Not on purpose. Haven’t told Mark (yes, it’s his, in case it seems like I’m implying otherwise—not physically possible that it WOULDN’T be). Anyway, if I get through the first trimester (and it’s very plausible I won’t, given my age) you and I should stop emailing. FYI.
Wow, I replied. Congratulations?
A part of me always wanted a third, she wrote, but I didn’t expect it to happen at this late date. You think he’ll be excited or freaked out?
You’d know better than I would, I wrote back.
I wouldn’t be so sure, she replied.
This was the first email about something other than music I’d received from her in ten months. In the beginning, many emails were about other things, though music was their point of origin. I’d been at their house for a Sunday dinner, and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 had been playing from a kitchen speaker as Libby pulled lasagna from the oven, I dressed the salad, and Finn set the table. I said, “I’ve always loved this piece,” and Libby said, “Did you know it’s the first-ever keyboard concerto?” I shook my head, and she said, “Because there were no pianos back then, just harpsichords.” Then, seamlessly, she turned and said, “Finn, tell Dad and Noah to come in for dinner.”
She emailed me the next afternoon, with a link to a version conducted by Claudio Abbado (How great is the harpsichord cadenza in the first movement?), and I emailed back concurring and adding that I hadn’t realized she was such a classical music buff, to which she replied that she’d played viola from the age of seven to eighteen, that for years, her dream had been to attend Juilliard but that by the time she was in high school and entering competitions, it was clear she didn’t have the talent, and she applied only to liberal arts colleges, not music schools. You contain multitudes! I wrote. Good to know I better not try any classical music mansplaining. In the following five days, during which, as usual, I ran with Mark twice, didn’t lay eyes on Libby, and didn’t discuss her with Mark, my sister-in-law told me over email that for her sixth-grade living biography, she had been Bach, that she’d never enrolled either of her sons in music lessons because she’d ended up so conflicted about her own but now she wondered if she’d made a mistake, and that the other day she hadn’t been able to remember the word Q-tip and feared it was the first sign of early dementia; I told her that every year from third to seventh grade, I’d dressed as a so-called hobo for Halloween, that in grade school I had wanted to play the trumpet, but my mother had said I could either play soccer or take trumpet lessons but not both and I’d worried Mark would think I was lame if I opted for an instrument, and that sometimes descending stairs, I felt an intense, fleeting pain in my left knee that probably meant I wouldn’t be able to keep running indefinitely, but for now I’d decided not to do anything about it. Somehow this morphed into Libby describing the school meeting she’d just left, at which a colleague of hers had not only fallen asleep but begun snoring audibly, and how Libby would definitely have awakened him if she’d been sitting closer, but she was fifteen feet away and unsure of whether the very act of standing and approaching him was more disruptive than the snoring, and then the meeting ended before she could decide. I told her about a client from years before who always removed both his shoes and his socks when he came to my office, without comment, as if this were normal, and she told me how when Noah was in first grade, she was the mom in charge of buying pumpkins for the kids at Halloween, and the pumpkins she got from a farm over the Illinois border were so dirty she had to give all fifty of them a bath. She wrote, Does this affirm your choice not to reproduce? :) We exchanged these emails at all hours of the day, into the evening, and that weekend, on both Friday and Saturday, we sent about fifteen each—we were debating what the best 1980s movie was, in terms of both quality and being most quintessentially eighties-ish—and at eleven-fifteen on Saturday night, she wrote, I’m falling asleep so night night William. Where was my brother at that moment? In bed beside her? In another part of the house? Was she in bed? Honestly, at the time, I didn’t wonder. Less than twenty-four hours later, when I went to their house for Sunday dinner, Libby and I didn’t discuss the emails, and after I was back home, at nine-thirty P.M., she wrote, We can’t do this anymore.
I was genuinely surprised, and wrote back, Why?
Are you serious?
Before I could confirm that I was, another message from her arrived: Because I’m married to your brother.
I considered not responding until the morning; I wanted a chance to collect my thoughts. But it occurred to me that she might interpret my silence as hurt feelings. Libby, you’re a wonderful person, I wrote. I adore you. But there’s nothing remotely romantic about any of this.
She didn’t reply for forty-five minutes, which made me wonder if instead I’d hurt her feelings. Her response when it came: If that’s really what you think, I envy your ability to delude yourself.
For the following week, we didn’t communicate. It would be a lie to say I didn’t miss her emails, to deny how quickly I’d embraced the existence of another consciousness with whom to exchange observations and experiences. And it would be a lie to claim I didn’t feel some inner turmoil. But it wasn’t the jilted person’s turmoil; it was the uneasiness that accompanies a misunderstanding.
On Sunday, I went to dinner at their house with trepidation, and I suspect Libby and I were both straining to behave normally, which mostly took the form of avoiding each other; Finn and I played about thirty rounds of Horse in the driveway.
That Wednesday morning at ten o’clock, an email arrived, again sans greeting or sign-off. I’ve thought about it and I think you were right and I was wrong and it’s fine for us to email but let’s keep it confined to music, nothing else. Driving to work this morning, I heard Górecki’s Symphony no. 3. Do you know that one? So beautiful and devastating.
I never explicitly agreed to her terms; I simply complied with them. We exchanged four or five emails a day for two days; then she wrote, One more stipulation: We should only do this once a day. I’ll email you between 8 a.m. and noon. You email me back between noon and four. No weekends.
OK, I wrote.
This time, it lasted nearly a year, with neither of us deviating from the schedule, including when she, Mark, and the kids went to Aruba for Thanksgiving with her extended family. And it wasn’t that I hadn’t known there were certain gaps in my life; it was that I wouldn’t have expected the gaps to be filled by receiving and writing one email per day about classical music, or that confining the topic didn’t actually feel that different from the brief stretch when we’d been telling anecdotes; in some encoded, albeit not erotic, way, confining the topic felt more personal. I’d still found another consciousness; I still could experience the anticipation and satisfaction of contact, the mental absorption of composing a response in my head before sending it. Being in touch with her offered a cushioning to my days, an antidote to the tedium and indignity of being a person
, the lack of accountability of my adulthood; it gave me stamina with Bonnie and willpower with Thérèse. I thought I’d achieved an equilibrium—one so eccentric as to be incomprehensible to most married suburban couples but, for me, one that could last. It felt sustainable in a way none of my relationships with girlfriends ever had.
* * *
—
I hear Mark told you, her message reads. Or “told” you. Since I’ve made it through the first trimester, we need to stop. I know I don’t have a ton of credibility on this front, but I mean it this time. I’m tempted to say something like Take care of yourself, as if I’m writing in your high school yearbook, when obviously we’re not saying goodbye for real, just goodbye to this version of things.
It’s eleven A.M., but if the correspondence is ending anyway, I doubt that I need to wait until noon to reply. Of course I’ll respect your wishes, I write, but are you sure? At the risk of stating the obvious, we could tell Mark we enjoy emailing each other about classical music, and I think he’d be OK with it.
She writes back, Are you kidding? He’d be okay with it only insofar as he could mock us both.
And then: And it wouldn’t be fun if he knew about it. ESPECIALLY if he was okay with it.
And then: When I said last year it was fine for us to keep emailing, I didn’t mean it. To put it in legal terms for you, I was giving you the plausible deniability you seemed to need. Sure, marriages come in all shapes and sizes, but if one person is getting close to someone else, either both parts of the couple have to know and be on board or else it’s a betrayal. Or, to use another legal term, a lie of omission.
And finally: The reason I pretended to think it was kosher when I didn’t was that it had become too hard to get through the day without hearing from you. And the reason I restricted the times we emailed each other was that I was waiting all the time to hear back, which was unfair to my family and a fucked-up way to live. It’s not that I actually WANT to stop now, but there’s too much at stake with a new baby. Mark and I need to be on the same team.
It is physically difficult to read these sentences—not for their conclusion but for what comes before, their implicit rebuke, her distress. I have tried throughout my life to avoid upsetting women, yet I have done so repeatedly.
I consider being blunter than I ever have before, blunt in a way I’d convinced myself was unnecessary with the sister-in-law I’ve known for over twenty years. I could write, I’m wired differently from most people. Call it my neurochemistry or call it my heart, but it doesn’t work like yours. It doesn’t feel what yours feels. My life would have been vastly easier if it did.
If I express these sentiments, I know, because I’ve been through it before, that two outcomes are possible. The first is that she won’t believe me, will cling to the idea of our being in love, and will plan to be the woman who’s different from earlier women. She will think she can cure me.
The second outcome is that she will believe me. She might initially call me names—I’ve been accused of being a Tin Man, of possessing a Frankenheart, of having a condition found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—but in the end what she’ll feel is pity.
I do not want to be cured by her, and I do not want her pity.
I don’t know what to say, yet it seems cruel to keep her waiting when she has made herself vulnerable. Thus I type, Neither “plausible deniability” nor “lie of omission” is really a legal term. They’re more like movie or TV versions of the law.
Then I scroll through old messages, reread the one she wrote about Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major for Violin, Viola and Orchestra, and listen to the piece in its entirety, while working on a brief. No message from her has arrived by the time the music concludes, but one comes in a minute later: Take care of yourself, William.
* * *
—
It’s early March now, meaning the sun is rising when I reach their house; the eastern sky is pale blue and tangerine. Mark is stretching in the driveway again, and when he catches sight of me, he says, “Guillermo, my man. Salutations.”
“You’re in a good mood.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” He lifts his chin and nods it once toward the master bathroom window, which is above the front door. “Look at that,” he says. “Queen of my heart, vessel of my progeny.”
Indeed, Libby is visible through the window; she’s standing with her back to us, wearing a pink T-shirt. Is she about to sit on the toilet or did she just finish? Oh, our private habits, our private selves—how strange we all are, how full of feelings and essentially alone.
Mark wolf-whistles. If it’s an inconsiderate thing to do to the neighbors at this hour of the morning, it works; Libby turns and looks out the window.
“Hey, sweetie,” Mark says. Though I doubt she can hear him—he’s speaking at a normal conversational volume—she waves. But she is too far away for me to discern the expression on her face.
A Regular Couple
After dinner, on the first night of our honeymoon, Jason and I were sitting in the hotel bar playing cribbage when, from thirty or forty feet away, I made eye contact with a woman who looked exactly like Ashley Frye. Jason was dealing the cards—our travel version of cribbage comes in a zippered case with a miniature plastic board that unfolds and tiny pegs, and although the dorkiness of it makes me slightly self-conscious, it doesn’t make me self-conscious enough not to break it out—and I said, “There’s someone over there who’s identical to a bitchy girl I went to high school with.”
Jason glanced over his shoulder. “Who?”
“The blonde by the fireplace, but I’m sure it’s not her.” It was 2008, we were at the fanciest resort in a fancy western town, and I had graduated from high school in Cleveland in 1992. It’s not that the area where I grew up wasn’t nice; it was a suburb inhabited by families with dads who worked in law or finance, and even though my high school was public, it was cushier than a lot of private schools. But the hotel where Jason and I were staying was mostly a ski resort, and this was in July. Running into Ashley Frye in the off-season would have been odd, and besides, the woman who looked like her was with a man who was probably fifteen years older, a little heavy, and generally too fatigued-seeming and unremarkable to be attached to Ashley Frye. “That girl was the queen of my high school,” I said.
“You were close friends, I assume?” Jason was smiling. He knows what I was like as a teenager—flat-chested and stringy-haired, the daughter not of a banker but of a science teacher—and my husband appears to find it endearing, this vision of me as awkward and clueless, I think because he considers me so confident and strong-willed now. More than once, he’s said, “You have bigger balls than I do.” If this is a compliment, obviously it’s not one that most women hope to receive from their husbands.
I put down a three of spades, then Jason played the three of hearts and said, “Six for a pair.”
“Maggie?”
The Ashley Frye look-alike was standing beside our table, the older man slightly behind her. She laid her palm against her chest. “Maggie, it’s Ashley from Clarke High.” Her hair was a more honeyed blond than it had been when we were teenagers—it looked expensively dyed—and she had the same ski-jump nose and wide green eyes. She also had crow’s-feet, lines at the corners of her lips, and a certain haggard leanness through her face. She was definitely still pretty, but not like she’d been in high school; that pretty had seemed to guarantee whatever life she’d wanted, whatever boy, whereas the pretty she was now was that of a well-groomed, mid-level professional—a pharmaceutical rep, perhaps. Nevertheless, I felt an old, visceral insecurity that manifested itself in an impulse to cover up our cribbage game with my hands. This was when Ashley said, “I’m sure you don’t remember me, but I just said to my husband—this is my husband, Ed—I said, ‘Maggie will have no idea who I am, but I have to go over anyway.’ I know eve
ryone must tell you this, but whenever we see you on TV, I’m like, ‘I totally know her!’ That’s what I say, right, Ed?” She turned back to me. “Ed and I just got married. We’re on our honeymoon.”
I hesitated—partly because I wasn’t sure what to make of her effusiveness and partly because, although Ashley didn’t seem aware of it, I actually hadn’t appeared on television in nearly two years—and Jason said, “What do you know? We’re on our honeymoon, too.”
Ashley’s mouth fell open with delight. “What are the chances?” she said. “When Ed and I made our reservations, I thought, This is such a weird time to come that I bet the whole resort will be a ghost town.” I had imagined the same, and been surprised when we checked in to find the lobby abuzz. Ashley extended her hand to Jason. “Ashley Horsford,” she said. Glancing at me, she added, “That’s what I go by now. Still getting used to the sound of it!”
Jason introduced himself and half-stood to shake her hand, then Ed’s, and I shook Ed’s, too. He made a one-syllable noise of acknowledgment, possibly something that wasn’t an actual word. This was the husband of Ashley Frye? He was okay, not ugly, but there was nothing about him that made me remotely jealous. He was like a generic man I’d end up next to on the flight from O’Hare to LaGuardia, hardly notice as I sat down, never really look at as I worked on my laptop during the flight, and not recognize by the time we reached the baggage claim. His face was broad and ruddy, and he was balding, with a few brown locks brushed back from his forehead and fuller hair along the sides. He wasn’t fat, but he had that paunch you sometimes see on guys who were high school athletes and have spent the decade or two since then working a sedentary job and drinking a steady stream of alcohol. Another part of what made him seem older was that he was wearing a blue-and-white-striped button-down shirt and a blazer, while Jason had on a long-sleeved T-shirt. We hadn’t eaten dinner at the resort but, instead, had walked to a pizza place in town, about three-quarters of a mile away, and by the time we walked back, the temperature had fallen below sixty degrees.
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