Dirty Love (7 page)

Mark sat there for quite some time. He was reviewing the difficulty of monitoring her when he also had to be at work. So there would be no work. He was between large projects anyway. He had never called in sick and so now he would. Maybe for days. He took out her cell phone. He was no expert with these things. With his own cell phone, he knew only how to make a call, take a call, and get his messages. He did not want to know how to do anything else. He refused to be one of these men who stared at small screens in their palms. He knew their weekly calendars were in there, as were their emails, as was the news and any other distractions they could find. But to Mark, this constant staring into a small screen was the sure way to miss the big screen, which was the one day and night you had to reach your goals, and if you didn’t see big, you would fail to see opportunities and you would fail to see threats.

But he
had
failed, hadn’t he? If Laura had not shown a new interest in his testicles, would he have detected what he ultimately did? For days afterward, he told himself he had overreacted, that his wife had tried something new with his body, that’s all. Maybe all those other changes he saw in her was simply evidence of her happiness with
him
and the life they’d built. But the following Saturday, as she changed into her Nike sweats for her second trip of the day to the gym, he waved at her from the backyard where he’d been raking wet leaves and twigs. He waited twenty minutes, then drove to the gym, cruising slowly through its massive lot. There were cars and vans and SUVs of all kinds, half of them coated with dried road salt, but no gray Civic belonging to his wife. His heart began to thump in his brain, his hands on the wheel felt tiny and far away. He drove through the lot five or six times, then he drove home and walked straight into the hallway for her laptop computer in its case, but it was not there. Nor was her cell phone.

He stood in the entry to his home for longer than he ever had. There was the oval antique mirror hanging beside the interior door, the wooden pegs beneath it for their keys. There was the coatrack against the wall, a blue sweatshirt of Kevin’s hanging there for years, his baseball cap on the hook beside it. It was from his first B-League season when they went deep into the playoffs and Kevin had made a diving stop at short that broke his wrist. There was the pine trunk Mary Ann would sit on to pull off her winter boots or to pull on her roller blades. Laura had painted the trunk on a tarp near the pool, a sage green Mark had not appreciated until it sat in the entryway and looked to him the color of home. There was the smell of wool and old paint and dust in the woven mat under his feet, three pairs of Laura’s running shoes in a neat row across from the trunk. And there was the empty place where her laptop should have been but was not. He told himself this was not a bad thing, for it would force him—the head of this family, the manager of the Welch Team—to remain calm. Over the years he had created a Strong Matrix, which meant he was in control, and if he lost that now, he could lose it all, so he would not look at her emails. He would not open her cell phone. Not yet.

And maybe she’d run an errand before heading back to the gym. It was not good that this thought had not come to him already. It showed he wasn’t thinking clearly. He drove back to the lot. He waited in his car for nearly an hour. When he returned home, the March sky a darkening blue, Laura’s car was in her place in the driveway. Inside the house, water was running in pipes in the walls, and he took the stairs two at a time to their bedroom.

He could hear the shower. He opened the door. There was steam and the smell of soap and there was his wife’s nude silhouette behind a rubber curtain.

“Good workout?”

“Oh, you scared me.”

“Go back to the gym?”

“Yeah, it was a tough class.”

“Why so long? You run an errand?”

“No, just the gym.”

He pulled the door closed. He kept his hand on the knob. He looked down at his yard sneakers, the toes damp and muddy. She was speaking again, her voice like the chirp of a bird who has flown into a black tunnel but does not yet know it.

There was the greedy, grasping need for him to know everything
now
, before she even stepped from the shower naked and cleansed of whatever she’d done. But no, he would stay quiet. He had identified the risk and now he would develop a response to it. He would delegate and subcontract and wait for a full report.

Mark stood. He walked around the foot of their bed and stared down at her. The light was in Laura’s face, though her features were soft and in complete repose. It was the look of one newly relieved of a long-held burden, and did she feel relieved just before falling asleep?

Downstairs his heart was a blooming pulse in his head. He moved through the kitchen, the overhead light fixture hanging from a wire and aiming at the windows like the spotlight from a police cruiser. He stepped over the broken chairs on the floor and retrieved Laura’s laptop from its case in the hallway.

In the kitchen he filled a glass with ice and poured himself three fingers of Bacardi and a splash of Coke and he carried his drink and his wife’s computer and cell phone into the living room. There was the masochistic temptation to watch the DVD again, to see her head lower out of sight in Harrison’s Audi TT coupe. But there came a tremor in his hands and fingers and he drank long and deep. He took her cell phone and pressed buttons that beeped until he found a bar for messages, sent and received. There were none in either file. Had she been deleting these for months? Or had she always done this? He opened her laptop and turned it on. The spartan light of the screen was like the parting of a wound.

What he’d expected to find was filth. Lusty bravado. Pornographic descriptions of what they both yearned for once they were together again. What he found first were work emails going back months, brief and routine messages about house keys and For Sale signs and balloon colors for Open Houses. There were a few old emails to and from Mary Ann, all of them upbeat. From Laura:
That’s great about your project, honey. When can you come home for a visit?

Mary Ann:
As soon as I can find the time. You know I always miss you guys! Love, M.A.

Mark sipped his drink. He felt both calmed by these messages but also aggrieved.
You guys
.

He found no emails to or from Frank Harrison Jr. He typed his name into the email history bar, but nothing came up. Why was he even doing this? The truth was out, so what was he searching for? He wasn’t sure, but the phrase
Know thine enemy
slipped between the heartbeats in his head and that’s when he aimed the cursor at the general history at the top of the screen and that’s when he saw an endless stack of Gmail accounts, one after the other. The tips of his fingers became cold as bone. He aimed at one of the Gmails and opened it, but he needed a user name and a password. He typed in his wife’s first name and the rest appeared in the box:
LauraMW
. She’d never been practical or very careful; she was the woman who lay under the sun at noon with no sunblock, the woman who ran at night in dark clothing; so he typed in the code to their debit card. Eight characters were needed. He typed it in twice, one after the other, the email opening instantly. It was difficult not to feel slightly proud of himself for knowing his wife so well, and it was difficult not to judge her harshly for being so careless, though his judgment of her had never felt so justified as it did now, for before him were two long emails between
LauraMW
and
FrankJH.
He drained his drink and he began to read.

T
HE SUN STILL SHINES
over the water and the beach shacks. Many of them are vinyl-sided and reflect whitely at Mark as he walks Lisa Schena to her car. She has parked in the driveway of a friend, and they are moving down the sidewalk through tanned bodies and sunburned bodies, fat ones and scrawny ones, tattoos abounding the way they do now, piercings too, five alone in the left ear of a girl no older than twelve, a burning cigarette between her fingers at her narrow hip. Lisa’s hand is small and fits snugly inside his own. He tells himself it is there, in his, because the sidewalk is crowded and loud with voices and laughter and the thumping of arcade machines, the roar of a motorcycle passing in the street, and it’d be rude to leave her untended in all this, but it was
her
hand that reached for his, a touch of skin, then a grasping that shot into his bloodstream and groin.

They may have had two more drinks. He does not remember eating, only listening to Lisa Schena who had given up trying to get him to talk about Laura, for he would not; to bring her to that table would make that table disappear and he did not want it to disappear. He wanted to sit and drink and watch world-weary Lisa Schena talk all day, though now she is quiet, smoking a cigarette as they reach the corner, nickels of flattened gum on the concrete, a trash barrel outside a pizza shop overflowing with tomato-streaked paper plates and empty Coke cans, and she drops her butt onto the sidewalk, then steps on it and leads him into the street through slowing traffic for the other side.

The sun is warm on the back of his neck. He can smell the rot of the ocean, seaweed and dried-out mussels on a rock, gull shit and wet sand and salty surf he only glances at as Lisa steps onto a new sidewalk and he keeps up with her. This one is largely clear of people, so there is no reason any longer to hold her hand, but she isn’t letting go and neither is he.

Up ahead are clusters of beach houses along short sandy streets. He can feel her bare forearm brushing his, and it’s strange she’s being so quiet. He glances down at her and she smiles up at him as if, in his silence, he’s been telling a long story and she is simply listening to it. They have to step around a small mound of sand in the asphalt, then they’re off Ocean Boulevard, walking down a narrow street, one-story beach houses wedged close together on both sides behind split-rail fences or chain-link. Some have tiny square lawns, others sand or pea stone. Many of them are flying Old Glory off poles in brass holders screwed into their door casings, and it’s as if these hard-earned summer places of theirs have to have some visual justification, that a summer home is yet another gleaming possibility in this continuous American Dream and these flags, most of their stars and stripes faded by the sun and salt and wind, are semi-defiant sanctions of approval for this excess, small as they are, built as close together as they are. It’s like a cruel joke is being played on these people, though sensing this, Mark feels above no one; in fact, he feels quite at home here, the brunt of a cruel joke himself, and that’s what he feels with this Lisa Schena too, at home, when she is nothing like any home he’s ever had. She has pocked skin and bad teeth and faded blue eyes and she talks on and on about difficulty and loss, but she does it with a glint in her eye, the black humor of the condemned, like we are all in this together and who, honey, said it would ever go the way it was supposed to anyway? And how nice for him now to maybe give up a little and stop giving such a shit, so he stops there on the cracked asphalt under the sun and watches his hands pull Lisa Schena to him, her eyes startled for only an instant before they soften and he kisses her deeply, her lips pliant, her mouth opening without hesitation, her menthol tongue there like the answer to a question he does not even know he’s been asking. His erection is as immediate as when he was a boy. In the darkness of his closed eyes, things seem to tilt a bit and he knows he’s half-drunk but he doesn’t care. Her tongue darts in and out of his mouth like a nurse tending to many patients at once and there is the guttural humming of an air-conditioning unit, the needy cry of a gull overhead, the sounds of a television in an open window somewhere, baseball again, the Red Sox, and he was a good athlete in high school, fast enough to play in college though he did not for he knew he was not good enough to play beyond that so what was the point? It wasn’t practical. It wasn’t the logical thing to do, and he is so tired of logic, so tired of managing every last detail of each and every day, and how sweet to let go of the wheel and let someone else drive, to let Lisa Schena pull away first, her eyes not so washed out this close up, but thin, as if they’re blue ice and every year of her life has melted away one more layer yet she has no sadness about this because she’s tougher than he is, taking his hand now, leading him wordlessly down the street and around the corner where a small boy sits on a Big Wheel staring up at them, a dried purple ring around his mouth, his mother sunning herself on a chaise lounge just feet away on her coarse yellow lawn. Her thighs are oiled and dark, and oblivion never felt as good as it does now, Lisa Schena letting go of his hand and turning down a driveway where her Chevy sedan sits behind a motorcycle under a blue tarp weighted on the ground with bricks. She’s climbing three pressure-treated steps of a small porch. Her face turns to him, “My friend’s a cop. He’s working a double.”

Against the house, a dead potted plant sits on the railing and she pulls from it a single key and unlocks the door. She pushes the key back into the dirt, then they’re both inside. The kitchen is small and neat, the floor linoleum. She is at the open fridge pulling out two cans of beer and handing him one. Busch. Beaded and cold. She is smiling, taking his hand again. “He has a deck up top. C’mon.”

Her hips in black denim, her ugly hair, her hand in his, small and warm. They pass through the living room of a man—a mismatched couch and recliner, a massive flat-screen television, a glass-topped coffee table littered with newspapers and DVD cases and two Xbox controls beside a full ashtray. The house smells like cigarette smoke and window cleaner and just as Mark takes the carpeted steps behind Lisa, her hand letting go, he sees a framed photograph of a man with a crew cut and trimmed mustache, his arms around three little kids.

“Is he divorced?” The question comes out of him, though he does not want that word in the air, and his fingers reach up and touch Lisa Schena’s moving knee. She laughs and says something about his ex-wife being a bitch.