Still Life with Husband (15 page)

And that’s the moment when I can’t take it anymore. I feel suddenly like the air has been vacuum-sucked out of my lungs; the sounds of the bar close in on me, pour into my ears with a painful, underwater pressure; the crowd of bodies feels like it’s bearing down on me, pressing against my chest, my back, my limbs.

“I’ll be right back,” I say, standing up. “I have to use the ladies’.”

“I’ll come with you,” Meg says, and she’s up and next to me before I can stop her.

We make our way through the throng, Meg in front of me. We sidle between people, twisting and turning like dancers to the far back of the building. I concentrate on breathing, on not panicking. As we approach the bathroom, I pull Meg off her course and direct her toward the exit. “I need some air!” I have to shout it so that she can hear me. We finally push our way out and emerge into the cool, dark night.

I take a few deep breaths. The patio, jam-packed during the warm months but deserted now, curves along the side of the building. Meg and I sit in uncomfortable metal chairs at a wrought-iron table.

“Thanks,” I say. “I felt like I couldn’t breathe.” I brace myself for her coming inquiry. She will have noticed something, the tension between Kevin and me, my strange, cold behavior.

“This is good,” she agrees. Then, “God, I can’t
stand
it.”

“What?” I stare over her shoulder, beyond her, at the few headlights beaming through the dark side street. The night is sharp and chilly, and the light wind blows right through to my skin, wakes me up.

“Steve. He can’t bear to see me sad, so he suffocates me instead.” Meg leans her head back and her hair drapes behind her. When I was little, I used to pretend to have long straight blond hair: I’d put a yellow turtleneck on, stretching its neck across my forehead, and toss the shirt backward, over my own frizzed-out mop of brown hair, over my shoulders, flipping it and prancing in front of the mirror. Meg’s soft veil of hair is the picture of the effect I was aiming for. She stretches her arms out to the sides, raises them above her head, brings them back down, her bracelets jangling. She straightens up, looks at me. “If he would just let me be miserable, I could get over it. I mean, I’m
getting
over it. But he’s treating me like I’m a hothouse flower, and it’s driving me nuts. Haven’t you noticed?”

“No,” I say, considering it. “Steve’s always so devoted to you. To tell you the truth, it hasn’t seemed unusual.”

“Mmph,” she snorts. “His devotion is a way of not understanding me! It’s the easy way out!”

“Huh?”

“He reacts against my grief by being
solicitous,
” she says, lingering, snakelike, on the
s.
“Whenever I’m down, he tries to jiggle me out of it, instead of dealing with me! He couldn’t even stand it when I lost that last hand of hearts!”

“Like that would send you into a hormonal meltdown,” I say.

“Exactly! And he’d be left with a puddle of me at his feet!”

“So, what’s to be done? It’s only because he loves you.”

“That’s why I feel like such a jerk,” she concedes.

I’ve almost forgotten about my own problems. “Can you talk to him about it?” I ask.

“Sure,” she says, sighing. “I guess. Only, this makes me wonder about the future of our marriage. What will it be like when something really awful happens, when my parents die or something…” She sighs again, and her gaze drifts. She seems to be letting go of the topic, relegating it to the emotional back burner, where you set the perennial, unsolvable problems on simmer. We’re both quiet, enjoying being outside, close enough to our husbands, to the action inside the bar, but far enough away to feel like we’ve escaped for a while. “What about you?” she asks, coming back to herself. “What’s going on with you and Kevin? Seems tense.”

“You wouldn’t believe,” I say. Which part of this melodrama am I going to divulge? The last few weeks of my life are a collage of details, and I don’t know which piece of it to offer up to her. “Tonight he told me that he’s willing to wait for me to be ready to move to the suburbs and start a family, but that I shouldn’t take too long.”

“Jesus Christ,” Meg says, her hand covering her mouth.

“And that, apparently, most women my age would be grateful to have such a family-minded man as Kevin.”

Meg makes a sympathetic gurgling noise in her throat.

“And at his doctor’s appointment next week,” I say slowly, for dramatic effect, “he’s going to get his sperm count tested.
Just to be sure.
”

“Oh, my God,” Meg says, not moving her hand from in front of her mouth. It comes out muffled.

We stare at each other for a second. Then we both start to laugh. And it finally feels like the one proper response to all of this, to Kevin and his eager sperm; to David; to the fact that I almost kissed another man; to the way I seem to have messed everything up with my cheating heart and my reluctant uterus. “Oh,” I say, trying to catch my breath, “Oh!”

Meg is snorting, the way she does, wiping her eyes. Then, just as we’re starting to calm down, she says with a wheeze,
“Just to be sure!”
which sends us sliding back down into whoops of laughter.

I notice, in the midst of our hysterics, that a crew of guys, all wearing their baseball caps backward, has just exited the bar, a swell of noise and smoke emerging with them and hushing as the door closes behind them. They huddle near the wall, swaying a bit, like tipsy grizzly bears, looking over at us. After a few moments, Meg and I have finally slowed down enough that I can breathe again. My stomach muscles hurt, and I feel, without a doubt, better. I look over and see that the guys are focused on the spectacle we are surely making.

“Girls! Hey, girls!” one of them, in a Milwaukee Brewers cap, calls out. “What’s so funny?”

Meg and I look at each other, in grave danger of falling into the well again. Her mouth twitches a little. I shake my head at her.

She rests the palms of her hands flat on the table.
“Sperm count!”
she shouts, and we’re gone again. I can tell that they’re intrigued, drunkenly interested in two women alone in the middle of a fit of out-of-control laughter, apparently struck down by the concept of semen. They probably think we’d be an easy score, thrilled as we are by a function of their anatomy. Plus, I’ve noticed, men tend to find it disconcerting when two women share a joke. They like the idea that we can let loose and have a good time, but they secretly suspect we’re laughing at them. Which I suppose we usually are.

They approach en masse, five of them, bulky. “You ladies seem to be having an awfully good time,” Yankees Cap says.

“Mind if we join you?” Plain Dirty Blue Cap asks, already pulling out the chair between us.

Meg stretches her arm in front of her, holds her hand up to stop them. “Sorry, boys, not tonight.”

“Come on,” Plain Dirty Blue Cap slurs, turning from Meg to me and back again. “Let us in on the joke.”

“We’re really happy,” I say, “because we’ve both just completed the last round of hormone treatment for our gender reassignment procedures.”

Meg says, “It’s been a long haul, but we’re finally free to live on the outside as the women we’ve always been on the
inside.
” She tilts her head up at the hulk of bodies and smiles her best, irresistible flirting-Meg smile. The five boys back away as one. They don’t believe us, or they wouldn’t if they weren’t drunk, but they’re just sober enough to know when they’re not wanted.

“Not bad,” Meg says admiringly, after they’ve gone.

“Thanks,” I say, suddenly remembering that Kevin and Steve are inside, waiting for us. I scrape my chair back from the table and stand up. These last few minutes have already begun to feel like a fever dream. Once again, I’ve avoided telling Meg about David, about the substance of my feelings. “Shall we reenter reality?”

Meg stands up, smooths her hair, wipes her hands down the sides of her shirt. “Such as it is,” she says.

When we get home, I check my e-mail quickly while Kevin is in the bathroom. In my dark office, I can see my reflection in the computer screen as the machine whirrs to life. His name is in my in-box; with surreal clarity, my face is superimposed onto its letters. The subject heading is “Why not?”

Okay,

I’m game. Let’s give it a try, the friendship thing.

I have to do some research at the Museum on Friday.

Do you want to meet me there? 2:00?

—David

He’s not giving me much; he might even sound a bit cold, unconvinced of the merits of a friendship with me. But it’s enough. I want to write back, “Yes! Of course! Anything to see you again! Yes!” But, with composure I’m sure I will be proud of later, I just write:

Sure. See you then.

—Emily

Kevin calls out from the bathroom, our earlier tension mostly suppressed, “Any interesting e-mails?”

“Not a thing,” I yell back, and shut down my computer. The sudden absence of the machine’s low hum is the only evidence that, a moment ago, it made any noise at all.

THE MILWAUKEE PUBLIC MUSEUM IS NOT THE KIND OF PLACE
that pulsates with activity, not the sort of establishment that is often full of people exclaiming over new exhibits, accidentally bumping into each other in the throes of lively learning. Downtown Milwaukee on the whole is a pretty vacant affair. Workers in business attire exit office buildings every so often, blinking like moles in the sunlight, but then, mostly, they’re only walking to their cars. Today the museum is practically deserted. When I arrived ten minutes ago, four or five groups of children were boarding school buses outside. Now, the entrance plaza echoes like a tunnel.

I sit down at a plastic table near the coffee shop, my left thumbnail immediately fiddling with the skin around my right one. The atrium is bright and sunny. White light reflects off white tables and chairs, off polished, unscuffed floors. An elderly couple walk slowly past, leaning against each other. They look companionable, as if they’ve been making their way through life in exactly this way, together, supporting each other, for fifty years. Then I get a good look at them, and I see that the man has an angry scowl etched into his face, and the woman looks wispy and scared, her eyebrows unnaturally dark and high on her face.

What’s it going to look like, this brand-new friendship? I want something. I just don’t know what. I don’t even know if it has anything to do with David Keller. I’m desperately open to the world, to anything new, to a taste, a sound, a sight—anything to file under
A
for “Alive” in the Emily Ross dictionary.

I feel a sudden, surprising pressure on the top of my head, and for a second I believe that the shaky old couple, who have disappeared behind me, must have mistaken my head for a tabletop or a ledge, that one of them is using me to keep from falling over. I turn, startled but cautious (since I don’t want to be responsible for anyone’s broken hip) to the sight of a man’s upper torso in a dark blue shirt; I look up and see David Keller’s broad shoulders, his unshaven face, his guarded smile. I notice that he’s wearing glasses, which I haven’t seen on him before, small round silver frames. Like a reflex, like my leg shooting out in front of me to the response of a doctor’s tiny hammer, an elevator of lust rises and falls in my stomach.

“You are absolved,” he says softly. He keeps his hand on my head for another second, then removes it. “I absolve you.”

“Oh!” I say. “Okay! Sure!” I stand up, clumsily, and a flicker passes between us. Do we hug? Kiss each other on both cheeks,
mwah
? Do nothing? David shoves his hands into his pockets: decision made. We do nothing.

“So,” I say. Once again, I’m unprepared, but I want to make amends, to admit something true. What I say next, I think with a certain self-conscious portentousness, will chart the course of what’s to come.
I’m so sorry.
“I’m such a jerk,” I say, and it sounds as inadequate as it feels. A stupid little involuntary smile inches up my face.

“It’s okay,” he says. “You screwed up. It’s not the end of the world.”

And there it is. He means it. I know he does. He’s a good person, and he forgives me, probably not least because what we had wasn’t very much, and it doesn’t cause him pain; if it did at first give him a twinge, it doesn’t anymore. He’s over it. He’s over me. These thoughts flash through my head as we stand there, facing each other, and what comes to rest, finally, inside me, is disappointment.

I cross my arms over my chest. We’re still the only two people in the museum’s entryway, but I notice, behind David, some people milling about the first-floor exhibit, others walking in and out of the gift shop. “I’m really glad you feel that way. I’m glad you still want to be my friend.”

“Well, we’ll see about that,” he says. His voice is teasing, gentle, his smile doesn’t fade, but his eyes are shadowy, impenetrable.

I look down at my shoes, worn-out blue Keds. They make me look like I’m about twelve years old, it suddenly strikes me. I bought them two springs ago, right after an ill-fated shopping trip with Meg. I’d been on a quest for a swimsuit and had ended up not only without one, but depressed and a little bit shocked about the state of my pale, winter-thickened body. I bought the shoes as a pick-me-up and understood for the first time the appeal of the purchase of footwear, something Meg had been trying to explain to me for years: you can gain ten pounds, but shoes always fit. I’m thinking about that April day and having my usual reaction to stress: my mind wants to flee the scene of the crime, to travel to strange and inaccessible places.
Come back. Say something.
I look at David. “Why are you here?” I ask. Oops. Not quite right. “I mean, what were you doing here?”

“I’m helping one of our reporters with some research,” he says, “for an article on town planning in Milwaukee. I had an appointment with one of the curators.” He is very serious, more formal than he’s seemed to me before, less approachable. Well, naturally.