Every Day (20 page)

Outside I walk south in drizzle to the library to peek in on Eliot and get more books.

“You’re a sight better,” he says. “Where are my women?”

“With their father. I came for more books.”

“Are we doing France or medicine?”

“Neither. Greece. Antiquity. Aristocratic life.”

“You got it.”

He keys in commands, and the printer spews out titles. As it does so, Eliot asks about Fowler. I tell him about going to the Seaport.

“Can you handle this?” he says. “I know whereof I speak.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No,” he says. “It’s just such a long way down. Farther down, maybe, than you’ve ever been before.”

“I don’t know about that,” I say.

•   •   •

At home I find Simon out in the garden with Jane. Daisy’s asleep in her travel crib on the porch. Isaac, I gather, is out with a friend.

Jane says she’s tired of weeding and asks if it’s all right if she goes in and watches TV. I tell her to go ahead.

“Have you seen him?” Simon asks as we sit at the picnic table.

“Yes.”

“Is this likely to continue?”

“What? Is what likely to continue?”

“The
contact
.”

For once he’s talking to me without doing a second thing, flipping through a computer magazine or wielding a hoe.

“Yes,” I say. “Until he dies.”

“And do you expect me to wait until that happens and then return to being the man in your life?”

“No.”

“What
do
you expect?”

I mull this over. “I don’t expect anything, really, except that we continue to be available for the children. I don’t think I
can
expect much, do you? I’m not sure that
expecting
is all that wise of a thing to do in general, anyway. You set yourself up.”

“Yes, you do,” he says. “But the children expect things. They expect their parents to live under the same roof. We’re disappointing them.”

“I don’t know as that can always be the ultimate consideration,” I say.

“You’ve always bemoaned the fact that your parents didn’t live under the same roof. Now you seem to condone it because it suits your whim.”

“I know that’s how it seems,” I say, “but I think I’ve been misguided in criticizing them. They’ve pointed that out to me for years. They live as they think they have to.”

“I can’t afford a hotel anymore,” he says. “And I’d like some time in my house as well.”

“Simon,” I tell him. “Sleeping arrangements can be made. For God’s sake, I’ll go to Mother’s at night if it’s too unspeakable to be in separate rooms for a while.”

“For a
while?
You act as if you made a small, forgivable error! As if you dented a fender or broke a glass!”

“I don’t feel as you do. I can’t help that.”

“We have to make a plan!”

“All right. I say we continue to share in the household duties, and if you want a week alone here I’ll make myself scarce, but if you don’t mind, I’ll continue to live and work here and be your wife and the children’s mother.”

He looks at the back of his hands, flattened on the table. “As if nothing is different.”

“No,” I insist. “As if we know everything is and we can manage it. As if it isn’t so awful. How awful can it
be,
for God’s sake?”

Of course, my mind is on Fowler, his legs and arms betraying him.

Simon tells me he’ll take the porch, as he likes sleeping out there in the summer. He asks that I confine my Fowler visits to times when they will not be obvious to the children. He says that as far as he’s concerned, this is a temporary arrangement, until one of us takes up residence elsewhere.

“All arrangements are temporary,” I remind him.

“That is only as you would have it,” he says.

We go inside to see to the girls and dinner.

chapter nine

In summer in ancient Greece industry slowed, men lay about, recovering from the cooler months’ labor, the manufacture of battle gear, battle itself, and agricultural duties. Women, according to one of my sources, “grew soft and languorous.” But during other seasons the women were as industrious as the men and as free to be at large outside the manor houses as their husbands. Granted, they kept separate quarters within the house, and visits to the husbands’ quarters would occur upon invitation, as it was customary for the men to have concubines as well. The women took separate meals, but they joined their husbands and male guests in the great hall, the
megaron,
at banquet’s end and often presided over the conversation and entertainment.

For my part, separate sleeping quarters and meals don’t seem uncivilized customs, and I mention this to Simon while he’s making up the cot out on the porch.

“A convenient philosophy for some,” he mutters. “However, you aren’t taking into account that these privations were balanced by a reward system I don’t think even
you
would approve of.”

“Meaning.”

“First of all,” he explains (Simon has read far more than I have on ancient Greece, having studied the great mathematicians for most of his educational life), “you’d have to be willing to spare a maid to answer the door when my concubines came to call, you’d have to forget about Fowler and external work, and you’d have to spend a good share of your time at the loom and in preparation of side dishes for me and my friends. You wouldn’t be permitted to cook the meat.”

“Let’s talk about whom you’d invite,” I say playfully.

He tries hard not to smile at this suggestion. “Let’s put our efforts toward a more elevated purpose. Like who’s going to go driving around and find Isaac. It’s after eleven.”

“Let me,” I say.

“That wouldn’t be allowed in
B.C.E
. Athens.”

“You made your point,” I say. “A hundred times.”

“Do me a favor,” he snaps, “and don’t expect business as usual.” He sits down on the squeaky cot, disgusted.

“I don’t. That isn’t what I want.”

Again I’m out in the car in search of my son, first over to Garland’s, where there’s no answer when I buzz up, then to the Burger King he frequents with his baseball pals, then to the movie theater, where the nine-thirty showing of
Speed
is about to let out. I stand under the marquee for a while, but the night is so sluggish and thick with humidity that I go ahead in and buy a coffee and sit on the carpeted stairs in the air-conditioning, grateful not to be confined to housewifely duties.

When the doors finally open I see Isaac, his arm draped over the very tan shoulder of a dark-haired girl who is as tall as he is. I stay, frozen, in my seat on the stairs leading to the upstairs theater.

As soon as our eyes lock, he nudges her in the direction of the exit furthest from me. She hasn’t taken any of this in, intent as she’s been on telling him something private, close,
right in his ear. Her smooth, tan face framed by long, straight hair, animated by the secret she’s told him, is prettier than any girl’s face I’ve seen at Hastings or in movies or in Manhattan’s most glamorous shopping districts. They leave the theater for the hot outdoors, and I watch them climb into a royal blue Miata parked in the first row, her car, I’m assuming, as she’s the driver.

Nothing—not Kirsten’s longing for Simon, Fowler’s mild pursuit of Pam, Adrienne’s poisoning my daughter against me—has prepared me for this.

“Ma’am?” a sweet voice behind me says.

The creamy-faced girl who sold me the coffee stands alone in the lobby, carpet sweeper in hand.

“We’re closing,” she says apologetically. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“I’m sorry.” I expel myself into the hateful heat, desperate not to admit the jealous rage I’ve been denying my husband, fighting to keep the composure, the nobility of a woman who knows (and reveres) her place. But this vision, of Isaac with a girl, doesn’t fit with any I’ve ever had of him. I am incredulous. My son has a girlfriend. It’s an outrage.

•   •   •

At home Simon is at the computer, typing up some sort of an announcement.

“Did you know that Isaac has a girlfriend?” I ask.

“I had that sense.”

“Has he said anything to you?”

“He’s said plenty. But not about that.”

“I just saw them leaving the movie theater together.”

“Really.” I can’t tell if this bothers him.

“What are you doing?” I say.

“Writing up something for the temple. I volunteered to do it. They wanted someone with good graphics capability.”

I stand still as an animal threatened by headlights. “Oh,” I say. “I didn’t know we were doing that.”

“I took Jane and Isaac on the Saturday you were indisposed in the city. They have a program for kids, I heard. Turns out it’s more for Daisy’s age.”

We’ve never taken them either place, church or temple.

“While Leigh errs, Simon straightens.”

He hits one of the keys hard. “Oh, cut the crap, Leigh. You’re way out on this one.”

I redirect, away from the betrayal.

“Who is this girl? She’s absolutely stunning,” I say. “Drives a blue Miata. I’m not sure if I should have followed them or what.”

He stops typing. “What would that have achieved?”

I can’t think straight on this. “Shouldn’t I be concerned here? He’s
fourteen,
for Christ’s sake. And she, clearly, is older, since she’s driving that sexy car. Is this what fourteen-year-old boys do? Find women who can drive them places? Two minutes ago, he was hitting grounders in Little League. I just can’t get my mind around this.”

I sound just like Mother, without the grace.

“Around what?” Simon laughs.
“This
is precisely what you’ve given him permission to do!”

“You seem relieved about this! Doesn’t it bother you at
all?
Don’t you feel any compulsion to go out and find him?”

Simon turns back to the computer and effects the involved process of turning it off—screen, printer, monitor, an order he has taught me not to violate, as I could “blow the mother board” or commit countless other computer atrocities.

“Leigh,” he says, as if it’s the last word in the language he wants to have to say, “I have learned, pretty recently, that however bothered or upset I am about anything that happens has no impact on the event or its perpetrators. I have learned that what I feel and think doesn’t matter. How am I supposed to get upset about Isaac riding around in a car with a beautiful girl?”

How like my father he is, with all his wisdom.

“I guess you can’t.”

“It wouldn’t help anybody.”

“So I should just let him stay out all night.”

“I have met the girl. Her father had me put in a system at their house. I took Isaac along. He also knows her from camp, where she’s working in the office, not that she needs to work. Her father also owns the camp. We’ve talked. So unless you want to involve the police, we need to trust him to come home or stay there. If you like, I’ll call her father. I’m glad you saw him with her. We can take shelter in the fact that no crime is being committed.”

“Do you think I’ve committed a crime?”

He sits forward, his face gentler than I’ve seen it since before the crime.

“I’m too tired to think about it at this point. All I want to know is how we’re going to live. I’m not sure this cot thing is going to work out. I can’t pretend like you can. And I don’t know if I can forgive you. You’ve reminded me that we see things differently, and that troubles me. And as harsh as it sounds, I don’t think it’s fair that you get to stay in this house when you’ve threatened the very life inside it.”

“A lot of things aren’t fair,” I say. “It isn’t fair that Isaac’s dad left him when he was four months old, or that people get lonely enough to have affairs to begin with.”

“I think that’s too easy,” he says.

“Do you want me to pretend I haven’t been lonely? You say I’m so good at pretending—I’m not. I like having a man look at me when he’s talking to me.”

“I’m looking at you.”

“But the gears are working against that,” I burst out. “You’re thinking of the next thing, the next project or task or event, so what you’re seeing isn’t me at all, but tomorrow.
Or
, if you do see me, you just see some person you have kids and a house with.”

“And when you look at me, what do
you
see?”

“I see rules. I see structure. I see love in its standard definition. I see the end of me.”

“You see someone to complain about.”

“I guess so.”

“That’s not so good, is it?”

“I guess not.”

Instead of moving into rage, he rolls toward me on the chair we fought about buying at Staples last month.

“Do you think he’ll give you back the beginning of you? Do you really think he can do that?”

“He’s pointed some things out,” I say. “Without meaning to, he’s shown me a part of myself that I’ve buried in duty, and it’s a part that I like.”

“And you no longer think I’m capable of doing that.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you’re in love with him, so of course it appears that way. It’s hard to believe I’m capable of doing anything for you when you’re in love with him, isn’t that true?”