Domestic Violets (16 page)

Chapter 20

T
he next night
, I’m in my bedroom leafing through my novel. This is not helping my shitty mood. As instructed, Anna hasn’t called yet. She sent me an e-mail shortly after getting to Boston, just to let me know that she’d arrived safely, but there’s been no talk of the book, and now I can see why. She tried to read it, but she had to put it down, stunned that she’d married a man who is so bad at writing books. On almost every page, there’s something egregious to change. There are typos, clichés, errors in logic, rambling sentences, and narration where there should be dialogue. This is why Brandon hasn’t called yet . . . and neither has my mom. Even my own mother wants nothing to do with it. I should flush it down the toilet, or set it on fire, or maybe both, just for drama’s sake.

Today at work, I would have discussed this with Katie and asked her point-blank if she was just humoring me before when she claimed to love it, but I couldn’t. She called in sick again. Two unscheduled days away from Katie have made me realize that I miss her. A lot.

I read a sentence aloud—a random sentence from a random page in a random chapter—and think instantly of ten things that are wrong with it. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll go to Ian again and throw myself at the mercy of his British accent. Hank is at the foot of the bed watching me, his ears bent at weird angles as he tries to read my mind.

When I get up, the house is absolutely silent, and it dawns on me that I should check on Allie. My dad is out, doing whatever it is that he does when he’s not here, and I’ve been held up in my room for a while now. She’s so freaking quiet, my daughter, that sometimes I have to remind myself when I’m the only one in charge of her well-being. This is something that a wonderful father probably wouldn’t have to admit to, even in his inner monologue.

“Allie!”

She’s not in her room, and so I call her name again. There’s no response from anywhere. The dog nearly trips me as I head down the stairs, which is something he does so often that I’m convinced he thinks of it as a sport. The silence downstairs is even more absolute than upstairs. It’s the type of silence that I imagine would occur after a tragedy of some sort. “Allie!” I call again, this time louder, thinking about all of the things that can happen to child who’s been neglected by her father for hours on end. “Allie!”

When I do find her, of course, she’s fine, lying on the floor, coloring a picture and listening to Anna’s old iPod Shuffle. “Hi, Daddy!” she yells over the music in her head.

“Jesus, baby, you scared me.”

I sit on the floor next to her and she pulls her ear buds out. “Why?”

“You’re very quiet, that’s why. Daddies need noise. Try to knock over a vase or something next time. Kick a hole in the wall, maybe.”

“OK,” she says, “I will.”

I give one of her bare feet a squeeze. They’re like exact, scaled-down replicas of Anna’s feet, with high arches and the fourth toes just slightly longer than the third toes, all asymmetrical and human. She’s drawing M-shaped birds in the sky above a drawing that contains herself, me, Anna, and some little smiling boy. Allie is taller than the boy, and so I assume she’s imagining a little brother, perhaps, in blue pants. For some reason, she’s given me blond hair.

“You know, baby,” I say. “My hair is actually brown.”

“I know, Daddy. Duh.”

“Well, why did you make my hair yellow then? Do you want me to go blond?”

She laughs, because, of course, I’m an idiot. “No. I know how to draw your hair. But that’s not you.”

“Well, forgive me. Who is it then?”

“It’s David.”

“David who?”

“David, Mommy’s friend. See, this is David, and this is Mommy. And this is David’s son Conner, and this is me.”

The air is a little harder to move in and out of my lungs suddenly, heavier somehow. “Allie, how does Mom know David?”

“They’re friends. He’s very nice and very funny. He has blond hair, see. He works at a bank, and sometimes he goes to Body Pump with Mommy, and me and Conner play together in the play room at the gym.”

I lie back on my elbows and think of his name—David—wondering if she’s mentioned him before. But, of course, she hasn’t.

“What’s wrong, Daddy?”

“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong, sweetie.”

“Don’t you like my picture?”

“Yeah. It’s a good one.”

“Do you think it’s fridge-worthy?”

“Maybe,” I say. “I’ll have to think about it.”

My mind has a way of beginning with the worst case and working backwards from there. When the phone rings past ten, someone is dead. When the stock market crashes, it can never uncrash. And when your daughter says a man’s name you don’t know, then something is wrong.

“I’m getting better at drawing people, I think. I’m probably going to be an artist when I grow up.”

In the kitchen, there’s this little desk by the phone where we keep mail and bills. When she’s gone, Anna leaves all sorts of information there in case of an emergency, like hotel names and phone numbers. But not this time. Our phone bill. A cousin’s wedding announcement. A reminder from the vet that Hank is due some kind of shot. But that’s it. Anna’s gym bag is in its usual spot, and before I even realize what I’m doing, I’ve set it on the kitchen table.

“What are you doing, Daddy? That’s Mommy’s bag.”

I don’t know what I’m expecting to find in here, but I’ve never been suspicious of my wife before and it feels like mounting desperation. Her running shoes are gone, but there’s her damp gym towel. There’s a dented water bottle. A copy of
Women’s Health
magazine, an Under Armour sports bra that smells like Anna, and a stick of deodorant. And there’s a book. A thin, hardcover little thing.
How Children Read: Essays from Kids on Their Favorite Books
. To some people, this would mean nothing, a strange little book in a bag. But Anna and I are book people, and I know what she’s reading and she knows what I’m reading at all times. Somewhere toward the middle, there’s a business card.

Allie has replaced my dad and his Porsche with her new picture—Allie, Anna, David, and Conner. She’s bypassed me and deemed it worthy of the fridge. “Look, Dad. We have to keep it up for a while so Mommy can see it when she gets home.”

On the back of the card, there’s a note.

“I think it’s my best picture yet.”

I can see that he’s written something else—something smaller, like a secret, but for a moment I keep it out of focus, like the last line in a book as you read your way down the final page. “Looks great, baby,” I say.

Part III

Chapter 21

D
r. Charlie and
I are at the driving range next to Reagan National Airport just across the Potomac River in Virginia, and my lunch hour has turned into a lunch two-hour. I wanted to talk to someone, but didn’t want to look like I wanted to talk to someone. And so here we are, two guys hitting golf balls on a chilly fall afternoon into a fading green field as jets roar over our heads every few minutes.

The rest of the world is at work, apparently, aside from two old ladies in matching visors over on the putting green.

“Maybe you should aim that way,” I say, pointing at the landing strip.

“Maybe you should shut your mouth,” he says.

I’m not a good golfer by any means, but Charlie is the next level of shitty. He tries hard, and amateurs like me are always telling him what he’s doing wrong, but still his balls leave the tee and about one hundred yards later make an impossible right turn toward forests, clubhouses, and windshields.

“Aren’t doctors supposed to be good at golf? How do they even let you practice medicine?”

“That was back in the old days,” he says. He takes another swing and we both watch the ball’s mysterious trajectory. “Now, with all the malpractice insurance we’re paying, we can’t really even afford to golf.”

I miss-hit my own shot and it skitters across the grass, barely getting off the ground.

“You know,” he says. “I seriously think you might be making too much of all this.”

I’ve told him about Allie’s drawing, the business card, and the bruise on my face, which is now faded to a mere smudge. He listened like a doctor, nodding, his face a blank slate of objectivity.

“Really?” I say. “OK, then tell me this. Have you ever bought a present for a woman outside your family on a non-holiday or birthday whom you didn’t want to have sex with?”

“Certainly a valid point. However, you, dipshit, are failing to recognize something very important.
You
may not want to have sex with your good-looking wife lately, but other guys do. Those are the facts. But the good news is, just because a guy
wants
to have sex with a woman doesn’t mean he gets to. Remember college? It’s God’s way of ensuring that we all show up for work in the morning.”

I drag a few balls over with my three-iron.

“Hell, think of it as a compliment,” he continues. “As the old saying goes, the only thing worse than having a wife who lots of guys want to fuck is having a wife who no guys want to fuck.”

“That’s classy,” I say. “You need to stand closer to the ball. You’re reaching too much.”

“Have you tried calling her, you know, like an actual adult, and asking her about it?”

“No. She’s supposed to call me. I told her not to until she’d read my book. Crazy me, I thought maybe she’d want to read it.”

He looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Junior high rules don’t apply when you’re married, especially when your daughter starts drawing portraits of strange blond dudes you don’t know.”

Another range ball vanishes into the parking lot. We listen for the crash and the car alarm, but there’s nothing, so we continue.

“What really bothers me is that she’s never told me about him at all. Not a word.”

“Yeah. And I suppose you went home every night after work and chatted her up about your little junior copywriter obsession, right?”

One of the annoying things about friendship is that there are these people in your life who can call you on your bullshit at any given moment. I skull a few more balls before switching to my equally ineffective seven-iron. The old ladies are working on their chipping now, and Charlie seems contemplative, looking at his tattered golf glove. It looks like it’s recently been chewed by raccoons. “Do you think I’m breaking my wrist too much?”

“I don’t know. Probably. Your stance is pretty fucked up, too.”

He looks at his shoes.

“I feel like I could write the whole goddamn scene,” I say. “This guy, David Anderson, sees her on the treadmills and so he starts timing his workout so maybe he can get the treadmill next to hers. Then he strikes up some conversation about bullshit, her running shoes or something, and then before you know it they’re in the parking garage getting it on in his Land Rover.”

“That’d be quite a scene. But I don’t buy it. This is Anna we’re talking about, remember? She’s one of the good ones. What’s wrong with my stance? This is how you’re supposed to stand, right? This is how they say to stand in
Golf Digest
.”

A plane lands with a loud roar, and we watch it because it’s impossible not to watch a plane landing. “Your feet are too close together. You’re all arm. You should’ve seen that book, man. Kids writing essays about how great reading is. It was like something out of a John Cusack movie. He’ll probably show up at my house next week in the rain holding a fucking ghetto blaster over his head.”

“I bet he looks like a total goon. Some harmless dork with a crush. Lives in his mother’s basement, masturbates constantly, sells
Lord of the Rings
action figures on eBay.”

A few hundred yards away, an old man drives a ball-retrieving machine back and forth along the field. It looks like a giant lawn mower with a Plexiglas cover, and so it might as well have a bull’s-eye painted on it. We both try to hit it for ten minutes or so, neither of us coming even close. I want to ask Charlie about his affair, but I don’t. We haven’t talked about it in two years, and I’ve made an agreement with myself never to bring it up unless he does first. Four years ago, when he was finishing his residency, he and another doctor had an ugly, destructive fling that ended with the girl’s husband punching Charlie’s front teeth out. He did this on Charlie’s front porch in front of Charlie’s wife and one of their kids. Charlie lived in a dreadful apartment in Crystal City for a while, and she hired a lawyer. But they eventually made it through, somehow, and now they live together like survivors of some awful tragedy, quietly going about the business of forgetting, smiling, and raising their children.

“Can I ask you something?” he says. His metal basket of balls is tipped over now and nearly empty. “Do you ever think maybe the reason you’re suddenly so convinced your wife is fucking around is that you actually want her to be fucking around?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Come on. All this erectile dysfunction shit? This mystery guy, David What’shisface? Your little high school crush? It’s like you want out or something, but you’re too afraid to be like your dad and just leave, so you’re trolling around looking for things to do it for you.”

When I don’t say anything, Charlie addresses his ball, takes a smooth, slow swing, and hits his first straight shot of the day, a long, soaring monster of a drive that bounces hard past the 250-yard sign. Obviously, he wants to celebrate, but that would somehow weaken his point, and so he just stands there, looking out across the field.

“Nice shot, dick head,” I say.

“I don’t think I’ve ever hit one that far.”

“Your feet are still too close together. And you should really rethink that shirt.”

Back at our cars, as we hoist our clubs into our trunks, my BlackBerry rings. I check my watch and count backwards to see how long I’ve been away from the office. I don’t really have a boss right now, and so it doesn’t matter one way or the other. I check the caller ID and do my best to smile.

“Tom Violet,” I say.

“So, are you planning on coming into the office today or what? I was just wondering.”

“Hi, Greg,” I say. “It’s 2:15, shouldn’t you be crushing the souls of the innocent and blacking out the sun?”

“You’re in another important meeting, I assume, right?”

“It’s called lunch, Greg. I eat it almost every day. It gives me the energy I need to be so witty and good-looking.”

“Well, I thought you might like to know, Ian has called a meeting for the whole department at three. Just in case you were interested in dropping by.”

“Are you serious?” I ask, and then curse myself for this unforgivable show of weakness. “What’s it about?”

“Why would I even bother telling you? You’re just going to pretend you don’t care.”

“Ahhh, Greg. I’m touched. After all this time, you finally get me.”

“Funny as always, Tom. You’re a real riot. Just be here, OK? It would look bad if you weren’t. You should at least pretend to be part of the team.”

“Good talk, Greg, but you’re not my boss. I know you’re not, because if you were I’d have already gone ahead and had my friend here back over my head with his car.”

I hang up the phone and ask Charlie to rate my exit line on a scale of one to ten.

“Who in the hell was that?” he asks. He’s sitting in his doctorly Acura SUV now, looking at me through his open window.

“My nemesis. Do you know any trained assassins?”

“Try Craigslist,” he says.

Before my friend drives away, he honks twice, and, for good measure, throws a Wendy’s soda cup at me, spraying ice across the pavement and all over my shoes. Hopefully he’s looking in his rearview mirror. If so, he’ll see that I’m giving him the finger.