Dirty Love (3 page)

But there was no sleeping. There were his mother’s words on the phone from earlier, and there was his father’s name, and there was Mark Welch’s heart having moved up to his head where, all these years later, he’d heard it once again as he watched those videos he’d paid an investigator from Boston to film, heard it as he walked by Anna Harrison on the sidewalk, heard it as he followed her husband’s white coupe three cars behind as Frank Harrison Jr. drove past the car dealerships on River Street, the machine shops and boarded-up Dairy Queen, past the Exxon station and Dunkin’ Donuts, then across the highway overpass for the turn to the gymnasium on the hill where he’d met and wooed the apparently restless and unhappy Laura Murphy Welch.

T
HE HOUSE IS TOO COOL
and smells like itself. Fabric softener from the laundry room, rust in the pipes, floor varnish where the sun’s been shining through the windowpanes all morning. Laura has the air conditioner on too high and goose bumps rise along Mark’s forearms as he opens the fridge. How empty it seems. In the bright space there are five or six containers of strawberry yogurt, a carton of eggs, jars of condiments, raw hamburger meat wrapped in plastic. On the bottom shelf, behind a grapefruit, two cans of Coke lie on their sides like forgotten children. He pulls one out and opens it, its sudden spray surprising him, but not really. He ignores any mess he’s made, and drinks long in the open doorway of the fridge.

He belches and tastes last night’s rum. He’s been drinking too much too often. He knows this. If he were a team member on one of his own projects, Mark would identify himself as a possible risk and he would begin to monitor and control that risk, for if he did not, he could become a threat to the long-term integrity of the project.

But what if the larger project has already been jettisoned completely?

Mark closes the refrigerator door and glances over at the upside-down table in the corner. The broken leg lies in the middle of it between the other three. It is a clean break, the upper part of the leg splintered but still fastened to the tabletop. To fix it, all he has to do is glue and clamp.

He stares at the floor. Six cracked tiles. He still has a box of them in the basement from when he’d hired a crew to lay a new floor five years ago. It would be more work to replace those. He’d have to break them up fully, wouldn’t he? Pry the pieces up off the dried mortar bed, scrape the old mortar down to the subfloor, then, on and on. He is tiring just thinking about it. He glances up at the light fixture. It’s back where it belongs, Laura having fixed that one herself.

He takes his Coke and walks through the dining room. They’d only used it for holidays, and it seems impossibly small to him now, the table covered with a lacy runner down the center, the silver candelabra there in the middle with its five new ivory candles, their wicks still white and coated with wax. It was a wedding gift, and when did Laura apply that wallpaper border along the tops of the walls? It’s one continuous illustration of cows grazing in a field, and it had taken her all afternoon, a Sunday not so long ago because the kids were gone and Mark would walk through the room now and then and ask her if she needed any help. She was in shorts and a dark top, her long hair pulled back. She was standing on their stepladder, the adhesive roller in one hand, the other on the border she was slowly rolling against the wall, her reading glasses at the tip of her nose. She’d said, “No, honey. Thanks,” and kept working. Mark stared at her long runner’s legs, a varicose vein behind her left knee. He stared at her ass and her hips and straight back, and he watched the twitch of the smaller muscles in her forearm as she smoothed the cows along. All these years and she was the only woman he’d slept with, a fact he gave himself no extra credit for, for that’s what he’d vowed after all, but he’d wanted her then as fiercely as when they’d first begun to make love in their early thirties in that condominium she’d sold him on Pickering Wharf. Later that afternoon, after the border was finished and their dining room looked more colorful but cheerfully antiseptic, like something from the kind of home magazine Laura enjoyed reading, Mark had brought her a bottle of light beer and stood beside her as she pointed out two air bubbles in the corner above the door. They were in shadow and she hoped no one would see it. He could smell her sweat and that deeper woman smell that Laura’s sweating gave off, and he pulled her to him and kissed her deeply, her glasses still at the end of her nose. A surprised sound came out of her, and she pulled off her glasses and dropped them on the table and soon they were making love on the carpet, her shorts and underwear around one ankle, the stepladder inches from her lovely head.

Mark drains the Coke and leaves the can on the dining room table. He climbs the front stairs to the second floor. He avoids the kids’ rooms and walks down the hallway into the bedroom he no longer considers his. Very little has changed. There is the same coral duvet spread across their king-size bed. Three decorative throw pillows are stacked in a pyramid on top of where both their heads used to lie, and he can see she’s taken another pillow and put it where his was before he’d carried it to his mother’s next door. On her bedside table is a magazine,
Runner’s World
. A page is marked with a subscription flyer, and he sees that she’s reading an article of advice on running in all four seasons, something she’s been doing for years so why does she need to read this? And isn’t it interesting, he thinks, that she no longer runs alone but with Frank Harrison Jr., that that time she needed so badly for herself she’s given so readily to another?

He closes the magazine and walks to her bureau. It’s a dark walnut that matches his smaller one, now empty, on the other side of the room. The surface of hers is as clear and spare as it always was. There’s the jewelry box sitting on the lace coverlet. There’s her antique hairbrush and comb and hand mirror, though she only uses the large one against the wall in front of him. In the upper corner of the mirror, stuck between the glass and the wood frame, are photos of the kids when they were in middle school. The pictures have been there for years, and many times Mark has leaned closer to study them, but not today. Today he notices the mirror is tilted down at a slight angle, something he’d probably done months ago just before he and Laura had made love late on a Saturday night or early on a Sunday morning.

Laura preferred being on top, and Mark would sometimes peek around her shoulder and hair to see their reflection in the mirror, to see himself penetrating his lovely, athletic wife. Once she’d caught him doing it and whispered, “That turn you on? Huh? You like a show?” He hadn’t answered, just kissed her deeply, but he liked how game she was, how she’d always seemed to enjoy their lovemaking as much as he did. Over the years they’d heard of friends of theirs who made love rarely, maybe once every two to three months, if that.

This was something Laura would tell him, for husbands did not offer that kind of information, though one did, Charlie Brandt. It was a pool party at the Welches’. The yard was crowded with friends and their kids, some of them grown. One was the Salvuccis’ daughter, a dark-haired university student in a bikini, and it was hard not to linger on her as she walked barefoot and flat-bellied under the sun to one of the coolers for a beer. Charlie had nudged Mark. He’d leaned closer, smelling of gin and hair gel. “I got one just like that.”

“Marie know this?”

“You shittin’ me? But hey, she’s got no leg to stand on, brother. She stopped fucking me soon as she got fat and she’s been fat for
ten
years.”

Mark had never liked Charlie much. He was an insurance salesman who stood too close to you and talked too loud, mainly about himself. But his wife was Laura’s friend from the Salem realtor’s office and so he’d become a regular at the Welches’ various parties, and now Mark judged him for cheating like that. Charlie kept talking. Mark had turned over the chicken breasts on the grill. He squinted in the smoke and glanced at Marie sitting with Laura and three other women at the umbrella table. She was a heavy Italian woman with a kind and pretty face, and she was laughing at something one of the others had said and Mark felt sorry for her then and told himself that if Laura ever shut him off he’d go to counseling and do whatever it took to get her back, but he wouldn’t cheat like Charlie Brandt who was now wandering off in the direction of the Salvuccis’ daughter in his Bermuda shorts and flip-flops, his gin and tonic in his hand like a conversation starter.

Mark opened the top drawer of Laura’s dresser. Fifteen or twenty pair of panties were rolled up and nestled beside one another, three neat rows of pink and pale blue, beige, white, and even a few red. Did she wear those for Frank Harrison Jr.? He pictured her standing before him as he lay waiting on the Marriott’s bed. Did she shuck them off quickly so they could get to it? Or did she make a dance out of it, something she’d never done for her husband?

That’s when he’d first felt the cool draft of suspicion blow between his ribs, when she’d done something entirely new. It was a weeknight, and they’d both gone to bed early. He was tired and distracted, thinking of his next project, an alternative search engine whose design they had to deliver in fourteen months. He was the lead PM and already suspected the scope of this was too large for its projected cost and time required. Laura’s lamp was on. She was reading a novel for her monthly book club, this one by a woman writer with an Indian name. Mark lay on his back and began to plan the meeting he would have to run the following morning.

He’d have to bring in all the principals, sit them down in the Mauer Conference Room at the long table that could seat twenty-two. His first few jobs as project manager, he’d sit in a chair at one side or another, his suit jacket off and his tie loosened, just one of the many contributing members of the team. At the time he was a believer in Motivational Theory Y, that all people are naturally driven and all you have to do is treat them with respect, hold the bar high but not unattainably high, and set them loose.

But his first two projects were managerial disasters. They were completed, but they came in weeks late, over budget, and three of his people had quit halfway through. He’d almost lost his job, but Teddy Burns gave him a second chance. He called him early on a Friday morning, Laura and the kids still in bed, and said, “Retraining Day, Mark. Come in in hiking gear, running shoes if you don’t have boots. See you at seven.”

It was early May. They drove up to the White Mountains, a two-hour ride in Teddy Burns’ black Range Rover, Mark’s young, fit, and prematurely bald boss behind the wheel. Mark sat beside him in the Nike sweatshirt Laura had bought him the previous Christmas. On his feet were the worn sneakers he reserved for yard work, and he sipped from the insulated mug of dark roast he’d brewed at home, sipping it slowly. He looked out at the weeds alongside the highway, the newly leafed-out trees, and he tried not to feel patronized and insulted by all this.

Teddy Burns was a lanky vegetarian who supervised every project manager on the East Coast. Before rising to upper management, he’d delivered some of the biggest projects the company had ever contracted: Elco Systems right before they went public; Bascomb’s Internal Review software; and Zebra Inc. right after the Chinese bought every share of its stock. He had a girlfriend he called his partner, an angular blonde attorney who at office parties sipped Pinot Grigio and eyed the roomful of project managers before her as if she were there to make some sinister but necessary decision about them.

While Teddy drove he’d been talking about new software applications on one of the many electronic gadgets he owned, something to do with GPS systems and the world’s dwindling supply of water. Mark nodded and sipped. He responded when needed, but he was from a generation of phone booth users, people who grew up with just a few channels on the TV you couldn’t get without fiddling with the antenna on top, a generation of people who went out and bought a hardcover book or vinyl album and then had to wait till they got back home to read it or listen to it; they didn’t download them from wherever they were, sampling one song or chapter before pressing a button to skip over to another.

“You’re a big sister, Mark.”

“What?”

“Like right now. You don’t give a shit about my new apps, but you’re acting like you do.”

“I thought we called that being polite.”

Teddy Burns was staring at him, one hand on the wheel, his eyes expectant yet scrutinizing. “Polite’s one thing. Being a big sister’s another.” He shifted into the passing lane though there was no one to pass. Mark could feel the effortless acceleration of the Range Rover, his head pulling back slightly against the leather headrest. “Is this when you go after my manhood, Teddy?” He was surprised he’d said it. Teddy Burns could fire him before he even eased up on the gas. He could pull over and tell Mark to find his own way home. But Teddy was smiling and shaking his head.

“I knew it. I knew there was a real PM in you somewhere. Boston wants me to send you packing, but here’s what I know: you’re playing the role of big sister, but you’re really the mean little brother.”

“Pardon me?”

“You heard me.”

Burns was right. When Mark and his older sister Claire were kids, especially after their father died, Mark had always hated being left out. More than once, whenever she was set to go to a party without him, he’d let all the air from a tire of her Camaro. He’d listen in on her phone calls for anything he could blackmail her with later. If she didn’t lend him five or ten bucks, he’d call her fat and ugly, two things she was not, though he suspected Claire secretly thought she was. Every American girl did. “Yeah, well, whatever. I appreciate your giving me another shot, Teddy.”

“Not good.”

“What’s not good?”

“You just established your edge with me and now you’re softening it by sucking up. That’s Weak Matrix, man.”

“How’s that Weak Matrix?”

“Because now your people don’t know who’s in charge—the edgy guy with balls? Or the smoother and compromiser?”