footsteps padding away beneath the street.
Wearing sweats and a T-shirt, I stepped out of the bathroom, drying my wet hair with a towel. When I pulled it off my head, I noticed Ariana in the doorway of our bedroom with her nighttime cup of chamomile and the cigarette-box jammer.
'Sorry,' she said. 'I don't like being downstairs alone right now.'
Unspoken rules had evolved with astonishing rapidity. We'd stopped changing in front of each other. When she was in a room with the door closed, I knocked. When I showered, she kept out of the bedroom.
'Then you shouldn't be downstairs alone,' I said.
We sidestepped each other, giving wide berth, changing positions. I didn't continue down the hall, and she didn't climb into bed. Instead she leaned against the bureau, still filmed with drywall dust. We studied each other, my hands folding the towel, unfolding it, folding it again.
I cleared my throat. 'Do you want me to stay upstairs tonight?'
She said, 'I do.'
I stopped folding the towel.
Her hand circled. She was trying for casual, but her eyes hadn't gotten the memo. 'Do you want to stay?'
I said, 'I do.'
She walked over, turned back the comforter on my side. I sat on the mattress. She went around and slid in. Her clothes were still on. I got in, also fully dressed. She reached over and turned off the light. We sat with our backs against the curved headboard. I couldn't remember even touching the new bed before now. It was as comfortable as it looked.
'Do you really?' she asked. 'Watch me cry some mornings through the window?'
'Yes.'
Even in the dark, we were looking straight ahead instead of at each other.
'Because you want to know what? That I'm still sorry?' Her voice was thin, vulnerable. 'That I still care?'
We sat awhile longer. 'I want to come in to hold you,' I said. 'But I can never find the nerve.'
I sensed her face rotate, slowly, toward mine. 'How 'bout now?' she asked.
I lifted my arm. She slid down beside me, put her cheek on my chest. I stroked her hair. She was warm, soft. I thought of Don's hands. His goatee. I felt a compulsion to pull away, but I didn't. I considered the distance between what I wanted to do and what I thought I should do. A collision of alternate selves, a crossroads to alternate futures. My wife had cheated on me. And now I was holding her. We were together, right now. I was afraid of what that would look like--not to others but to myself. In my quieter moments. Driving to work. Sipping coffee between classes. Watching a clever movie scene about extracurricular fucking, Ari stiffening beside me, our sudden chagrin in the dark of a theater. That stiletto jab of paradigms past, of how it was supposed to be.
'I think I want to have a baby,' Ariana said.
My lips were suddenly dry. 'I've heard you have to have sex for that.'
'Not right now.'
'I wasn't suggesting--'
'I mean, not a baby right now. Or even soon. But being threatened like this, I've been thinking about our life a lot. I'm sure you have, too. I've got stuff I like to do--the furniture, my plants. But I'm not gonna be content to turn into one of those women who drives her SUV up and down these hills, going to stupid appointments and Whole Foods. I mean, look at Martinique. That's where I'm headed.'
'You're not--'
'I know, but you know what I mean.' Her hand twitched, looking for something to do. 'I want to have a baby, but at the same time I'm terrified that I want to have a baby for all the wrong reasons. Does any of this make sense?'
I made a soft noise of support. A flash of copper pipe gleamed where we'd torn through the drywall by the bathroom. Her head rose and fell with my breathing. We lay there awhile longer, as I worked my feelings into words.
'I don't want to keep doing what I've been doing,' I said. 'Or at least I don't want to feel the same way doing it.'
'Yes. Exactly.' She came up off my chest, excited. 'So here we are. Now. Off balance from all this crap, but at least seeing clearly. Let's not upset that.'
'What do you mean?'
'What if you don't check for that e-mail Sunday? What if we just stick our heads in the sand and pretend nothing's wrong?'
'And you think it'll go away?'
'Let's pretend it will. Let's pretend that everything's like it was before hidden cameras and Don Miller and screenplay deals. Just for tonight.'
We lay together, fully dressed, in our bed. I held her until her breathing evened out, and then I lay there awake, listening to her sleep.
Chapter 24
Gmail's home page glowed back at me from my computer. The filled-in ID and password, my finger again poised above the mouse, Ariana over my shoulder, her breath scented of the strawberries she'd eaten in a cereal bowl with milk and sugar. The day, like yesterday, had passed in an excruciating crawl, Ariana and I on top of each other, slogging through mind-numbing work and household tasks, trying not to reference clocks and watches. The time in my menu bar showed 4:01 P.M.
As my finger lowered, Ariana said, 'Wait.' She pulled the mariposa--orange again--out from behind her ear and fiddled with it. 'Listen, I know we were getting suspicious there for a while. Of each other. Now that we're getting clearer, I just wanted to ask you . . .'
'Go on.'
'Is there something--anything--you want to tell me?'
'Like what?'
'Like what that e-mail's gonna hold?'
'As in me snorting blow off a stripper's thigh? No, there's nothing, Ari. I've been racking my brain, and I can't think of a single thing.' I clicked 'Log In' brusquely, in protest of her question. Then it hit me to ask, 'Is there something you want to tell me?'
She leaned forward. 'What if it's me and Don?'
As the page loaded, I sat with that one, the weight of it low in my stomach. That was all I needed--my wife's one-night mess sent right to my desktop. A high-water mark of invasiveness. The thought brought to mind a snatch of my conversation with Punch--how e-mails, even once they're deleted, leave an evidence trail in the hard drive.
With dread, I stared at the loading page. It hadn't occurred to me that once I opened that e-mail, I couldn't control what it carried with it. Into my computer.
Before I could do anything, there it was, a single e-mail staring out at us from my in-box. The sender line, blank. Subject line, blank. For now, the unopened e-mail still resided safely on the server, not yet called up on my computer. I moved the cursor all the way to the side of the screen, in case it decided to double-click the e-mail by itself.
They'd visited this computer already, printed out those JPEGs of our floor plans. I checked the history function of Explorer to see which Web sites had been recently visited. It listed none I didn't recognize.
'Wait,' Ariana asked. 'Why aren't you opening the e-mail?'
I mimed someone listening, then gestured a question: Where's the jammer? In answer she tugged the fake pack of Marlboros from her pocket. She never let the thing out of her sight.
'I don't want to do this here,' I said. 'From my computer.'
'Look,' Ari said, still back a step, 'if it is me and Don, we might as well face it together.'
'No, I mean I shouldn't be retrieving data from them on my computer. Even if I erase it, the record of it stays in the hard drive somewhere. Or they could use an e-mail to piggyback in some virus that lets them read my computer remotely.'
