“Do I have to brush my teeth?” She sounded like she’d maybe identified a loophole in the tooth-brushing law, and was ready to exploit it.
“Yes, you do.” Frances was firm.
“What’s up, Lal?” Michael was sitting in the big, comfy chair in their bedroom, his laptop open on his lap. Multitasking, as usual, although the news about Anne had almost made him close his computer.
The little girl turned to him and stuck out her arm. “There’s a hair on my toothbrush.” She pulled out her new strategy. “It seems unsantiary . . .”
“You mean unsanitary?” She nodded, because that was what she’d said. Michael took the toothbrush from her, removed the hair, and handed it back. “It’s fine now. Was it your hair?”
She shrugged, turning to go, her tiny little form in elephant pajamas almost too cute to bear. “I think it might have been Jack’s.” Jack was one of their dogs.
“Was he using your brush?” Michael was joking, of course. The dog had his own brush, one of those items that mysteriously turned up in drawers whenever Frances was looking for something else, but which couldn’t be found twice a year when she remembered you were supposed to brush the dogs’ teeth. In the same class were things like chargers for SLR cameras, passport photos you hadn’t sent in with the application yet, kitchen implements used only at Thanksgiving, and those tiny screwdrivers for fixing eyeglasses. Frances dubbed the whole class “occultatum,” after the Latin word for hidden. This coinage made her feel slightly pretentious, but she enjoyed muttering it when she pulled open drawer after drawer looking for something.
Lally was losing interest. “No, but I think Milo was combing his hair with it. I’m not sure. Something.”
Frances tried for clarification. “Milo was combing his own hair, or Jack’s fur?”
Lally just shrugged again and wandered out. Frances turned to her husband. “Did you understand that?”
He shrugged just as his daughter had and turned back to his screen. Then he remembered what they’d been talking about and looked up again. “No, really, right there in the front room? Visible from the street?”
Frances made a face. “No. They were on the floor, not hovering in midair. The only reason I saw them was because I walked into the actual house.”
“For the toilet roll tubes?”
“Yes. At first I thought it was Charlie . . .”
Her husband laughed. “You thought Anne and Charlie were having interesting sex on the floor of their living room at nine in the morning?”
Frances pulled off her boots and started taking off her clothes. “OK, maybe that isn’t very likely, but it is the first assumption you make when you see a married friend having sex on the floor.”
“Oh, I know that’s what I think every time. Have you ever seen anyone else having sex on the floor? Is this what you get up to while I’m at work?”
Frances pulled off her sweatshirt and bra, enjoying that first scratch of tit-freedom, then put on a large pair of flannel pajamas with dogs on them. “Yes,” she replied. “I creep from house to house, hunting for people having sex.”
Michael smiled. “We’ve been married nearly twenty years, and you haven’t changed a bit.” He paused. “Are you going to blow the whistle?”
“Good Lord, no. Why would I do that?” She looked at her toenails, which needed cutting.
“I don’t know. Because it’s honest?”
She looked at him, and raised her eyebrows. “You’re joking, right? Why on earth would I do that? This other guy could be just a one-time thing.” She reached into her bedside drawer, hunting for her nail clippers.
“Like in a porn film? He was delivering a pizza?”
She snorted. “Yes. Because Anne Porter has pizza for breakfast every day.” No clippers, what a fucking shock.
“OK, he was delivering a brioche and a venti Americano.”
Jack and Diane, the dogs, came in and jumped on the bed. Frances shut the drawer and scooched back to make room for snuggling, wondering if Anne would have had an affair if she’d had a dog. I don’t have the sexiest marriage in the world, she thought, but I get a lot of affection and approval from my dogs, with far less negative fallout. Maybe I should persuade her to drop the extracurricular sex and get a rescue dog instead. Then she thought about what Michael had said, and her mind wandered. “Why don’t they deliver more interesting things in porn movies?”
He didn’t look up from his screen. “Because most people aren’t focusing on what the setup is, you doofus. Oh, let’s watch The Sears Guy Always Comes Twice, it’s all about the exigencies of appliance repair. The way the director sets up the tensions and potential resolutions in the first ten minutes is masterful, and the anal is all in one take.”
Frances opened her mouth to reply, when Ava walked in. Michael closed his computer. Frances noticed this every time: For her he kept the screen open, just in case something more interesting popped up, but for his firstborn he shut the screen without even thinking about it. She wasn’t jealous; she was reassured every time she saw the pecking order in action. She would put the kids before him, every time, and he knew it and would do the same. If he didn’t take a bullet for the kids, he’d have to take one from Frances.
“Why are you guys talking about anal? And can I get a phone?” Ava asked this question pretty much every day, but so far the answer had been no. However, she had clearly studied compound interest and thought maybe bugging worked the same way: A little every day would mount exponentially. And maybe she was right. Frances could feel herself weakening.
“We weren’t talking about anal, we were discussing film theory, and no,” said Michael.
“But—”
Frances interrupted her. “Every kid in school has one but you, what if
