'No, I just walked in the door a few minutes ago.' He snaps on the lamp, and I curl away from the light.
'Oh, not bad tonight. We had a full house. Pretty lively old farts, too. Better than the stiffs in Cleveland.'
I draw a damp tangle of sheet up over my naked back and lie perfectly still. I'm listening for a nervous tremor or a false note in his voice, but it isn't there.
'Well, maybe we should get somebody else to do it and deduct it from the rent. They've been dinking around…'
I lie there like a lump for a while, and then I go into the bathroom and sit. The John faces a mirror; in the fluorescent light my sunburn looks freshly slapped. My shoulders are starting to peel away in patches. I shift onto the tile floor. From this angle, the shower stall seems to tilt precariously over me. I count blooms of mildew up on the ceiling. The sickening light and the glare off the white tiles remind me of the places they put nutcases.
I tell myself that they're talking about plumbing, for God's sake, the kind of business you transact with a wife. This has nothing to do with me, with us. When he gets her off the phone, I'll suggest a dip in the pool.
The door is ajar; through the slit I can make out his profile, the Roman nose, half a drowsy smile, the green eye gazing far away. He is still talking. 'It was eighty-two today… Just went to the beach for a while. Remember at Nag's Head, all the old guys lined up fishing blues off the pier? I think they come down here for the winter… That was good, wasn't it?' A long pause. 'Me too, babe. Good night.'
The phone clicks into the receiver. I hear him yawn, and then he shuts off the lamp.
He's forgotten I'm here.
I wait a few moments, unsure of my next move, then decide that the best course of action is to act as though nothing has happened. I emerge from the bathroom, spraying an arc of light across the bed that catches Pavel like a deer in headlights. One hand sneaks over his flaccid genitals.
'Home?' I ask brightly.
He nods, blinking against the light.
'So, how about a swim?' I suggest.
'It's kind of late. Maybe tomorrow, huh?'
'Tomorrow we go to Tulsa.'
'Yeah. Well…' His eyes shift away, to the door. 'It's kind of late.'
When I was eleven, my family went on vacation to Lincoln City on the Oregon coast. I met a boy, Jeff was his name, and we spent long days on the beach, daring each other into the chill green surf, feeling the pull of the undertow slide around our ankles as we raced back out. Lying side by side on beach towels, we would talk and pretend not to notice when the tips of our fingers brushed the other's skin. Our families teased us, said it was puppy love. On the morning my family was leaving, Jeff led me by the hand into a dune behind the motel parking lot, and he kissed me. We were as solemn as penitents taking communion. Then he said that he loved me and would not forget me, not ever. All the way back to Sacramento, I kept my face pressed to the car window, feeling the chrysalis of my heart crack open, a strange lush ache. I pretended it was carsickness, but my mother knew. There will be others, she told me.
Meanwhile, tomorrow we go to Tulsa. I pick up my T-shirt, puddled on the carpet, and pull it over my head. I drag on my pants, stuff my underwear in a pocket. My scarf is nowhere to be seen, but so what, I've lost things before. At the door, I turn and smile brightly at him.
'Sweet dreams, lover.'
The Best Man
Mike follows a trail of bright pink spots. They lead into the living room, across the carpet, and to the off-white couch he and Rachel bought before they became parents. There lies his son, sucking on his sippy cup, blissful as a junkie. Somehow, Noah has managed to spill juice out of the cup, something the manufacturer claims is impossible but which Noah accomplishes with astonishing regularity.
'Shit, Noah.' Mike is yelling. 'Is it too much to ask to leave us one fucking' – he corrects himself – 'one frigging room?'
His son stares at him, stricken, his wide eyes already brimming with tears.
'Just give me that.' Mike takes the plastic cup, and Noah lets out a wail.
'We've talked about this. No juice in the living room.' He tries reasoning, but the boy is inconsolable, lost in his grief. 'Okay, c'mon, we can finish it in the kitchen.' Mike starts to pick up his son, but the pitch of the squall rises. Walk away, Mike tells himself. Just walk away. He goes into the kitchen and returns again with spot remover and a sponge. Mike tries to ignore his son's sobs as he scrubs at the carpet. It is unendurable.
'Hey, I've got an idea. Why don't you show me how your new fire truck works. What do you say?' Mike is almost pleading.
Noah stops howling and appraises Mike warily. The boy's cheeks are still slick with tears and snot, but the storm is already over. He trots toward his bedroom, and when Mike catches up, Noah is waiting to demonstrate how the ladder raises and lowers, how the red light flashes, how the truck can scale the bookcase and walls of his room. Just like that, another twenty minutes have passed.
Mike leaves his son herding plastic farm animals up the ladder of the toy fire truck, and checks again the slow progress of his wife's dressing. The babysitter is fifteen minutes late and Rachel is still half-dressed, sifting through a heap of panty hose on the bed. She runs her hand through each leg and holds it up to the light, appraising the nylon with the concentration of a jeweler looking for flaws.
She is wearing a lace bra and matching panties, less familiar than the cotton underthings she usually wears. Her breasts and buttocks billow out of the skimpy lace, and Mike can almost feel in his fingertips the swells and hollows of her flesh. It feels like the itch of a missing limb. Now's a bad time for this train of thought, he tells himself. Now usually is. They had a hard time conceiving Noah, and the three years of calendars and thermometers and injections left the hardened imprint of obligation on their lovemaking. Even after the triumph of their son's birth, they approach each other measuredly.
Mike checks his watch: 2:35.
'Why don't you throw them out if they have runs in them?'
'Not runs, snags. If I threw out a pair of panty hose every time they had a snag, I'd wear them once.'
'Then wear them once,' he snaps. He snatches a pair off the bed and lobs them into the wastebasket.
'Mike, those are four-fifty a pair. What's with you today?'
I'm going crazy, he thinks. He's not, but he wants to. What he would give for one day, just one, when he could blow it through the roof, get drunk, sleep with a stranger, and not live with the consequences. One day, and then he'd come back. Happily. It's not that he doesn't love Rachel and Noah. He would crawl over glass for them. But just one day.
He can't tell Rachel all this, though: the price of being given a second chance is that for the rest of his life he will weigh his words and be careful not to do anything irrevocable.
He retrieves the stockings, but she's already found a pair to her liking and is stretching the filmy material up the length of each calf.
'I'm sorry. I'm feeling squirrelly today.'
Rachel bounces on her toes, tugging the waistband up over her buttocks. 'You're nervous about seeing your old girlfriend.' She says this as calmly as stating the time of day. Even as he is denying it, Mike realizes that his mind is as familiar to Rachel as her body is to him.
The babysitter finally shows. Mike watches his son gallop down the hall and thrust the toy fire truck into the girl's hands. The boy's eyes are round and hopeful, like an eager suitor's. He tugs at her knee, trying to scale the leg of her jeans, until she absently scoops him up. Mike tries to imagine what is different about her from a string of rejected sitters, but there is nothing he can see that might account for his son's violent adoration. That's the way of it, he thinks. It's just there, inexplicable as electricity. He wonders again how it will be to see Caitlin.
