Results May Vary (2 page)

“Oh wow,” I said, feeling at once turned on and uncomfortably voyeuristic. Which, of course, is exactly how Patrick intended the viewer to feel. The face of his lover was cropped from all of the photos; curiosity tickled like a feather on my skin.

“I know, right?” said Alicia. “They're something.”

“They are,” I said. She was reaching the end of the stack now. I was pretty sure none of these were going to be right for the museum—we didn't shy away from nudes, obviously, or erotic undertones, but these were probably too strong to be hung in a family-friendly museum. The photographs in the main show were better suited. But still, I wanted to see all of them. I wondered what Patrick's partner felt about these intimate images being put up for sale—if he even knew.

A burst of laughter and conversation broke my concentration as the door opened and Adam poked his head inside.

“What are you girls doing in here?” He sounded irritated, almost strained.

“I knew you couldn't wait until I came back. Alicia's showing me some of Patrick's other work,” I said. “Come see.”

Hesitantly, he walked forward.

“Aren't these amazing?” I said. “Probably a little too risqué for the museum, but they're so powerful.”

He nodded so faintly I wasn't sure his head had even moved.

Come on,
I thought.
You cannot be this weirded out by the sight of two guys together.

Alicia pulled one more photograph from the case. It was another arresting image: Patrick's partner was leaning diagonally across the frame, his body cropped between chest and thighs. He was caught in a half-turning motion, tension pulling the side of his torso as he moved. Patrick was kissing him, just above his hip, and one of his arms was bent in a V across his partner's body, down and up. I studied the lines of Patrick's arm, the way his skin made such a bold stripe of contrast across his lover's body. The shutter had frozen him in a breathtakingly sensual moment of the kiss—I could see the negative space between his arched lips and his partner's skin.

And then, I noticed it. A little blob of a birthmark, floating under the right side of the partner's ribs, almost out of sight. As if someone had daubed him with a paintbrush, just the slightest little touch, leaving behind the shape of a checkmark.

“Hey, Adam,” I said, laughing. “Check it out, this guy has a birthmark exactly like yours! Isn't that—”

But when I turned and saw my husband's face, the words piled up in my throat. He was staring at the photograph in shock, his face knotted with horror. It wasn't some other man with an oddly identical birthmark in Patrick's photograph.

It was Adam.

I love you
because
I love you, because it would be impossible for me not to love you.

—Juliette Drouet to Victor Hugo, 1833

One thousand times. That's how many times it must have been, at least, but probably even more, stretching over the sixteen years we had been making love to each other. Almost half our lives. A thousand times I felt him sink into my body; heard his sighing groan as he came. A thousand times I wiped his semen from between my legs: the very tangible remainder of his arousal.

A thousand times or more, starting with that very first, two months into our senior year of high school. We had spent the entire previous year exploring, all fingertips and question marks, and gradually we found ourselves wanting to know more of the answers. But Adam was patient, at least back then; and perhaps even more than that, he was exacting. Our first time would not be a rushed, fumbled affair, our bodies folded into corners on the couch in the basement of his parents' brownstone. It would be deliberate, and it would be beautiful.

I let him draw me toward it slowly, sensing it was coming but not knowing when exactly it might arrive. And then, there it was: one fall weekend when his parents were out of town at a film festival, and mine had happily swallowed a tale about a visit to a barely remembered girlfriend at some college upstate. We walked hand in hand to pick up his parents' car after school, and when the garage attendant winked at me as I settled into the passenger seat, I felt my blood simmering with anticipation. Because I knew.

Adam drove us north along the Taconic, as the early falling October darkness wrapped its wings around us. We talked to each other over the soft chords of his R.E.M. CDs, and every so often he would take his eyes off the road long enough to give me a slow, sweet smile, full of promise. I had never before felt so aware of taking a step into my future. We were about to discover each other.

The air inside his parents' converted Dutchess County barn was chilly, so we hauled armloads of wood inside and built a fire in the great room while we waited for the furnace to pump heat into the space. He made a nest for us on the carpet in front of the fireplace, with old wool Pendleton blankets that smelled like winter and scratched against my bare, goosebumped skin; but I was warm, so warm, wherever he touched me.

The first time I wrapped my hand around his erection, he gasped. I knew I was the first person to touch him like this, just as he was for me, and the sheer beauty of that, it pierced me. I took in the velvety warmth of him in my hand, the startled pleasure on his handsome face that deepened as I started to stroke him, and I thought,
I want to be the only one to do this. For always.
And when he slid into me for the very first time a little while later, his hands on my face were shaking.

“You mean everything to me, Caro,” he whispered. “I love you, and I swear to you, I always, always will.”

He proposed the night we moved into our first apartment, a microscopic Morningside Heights one-bedroom with paint-clotted moldings and windows that coughed in exhaust from Riverside Drive even when they were closed. We sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor, with a bottle of Trader Joe's sparkling wine and some congealing Chinese takeout between us, and talked about the future. His future, mostly. The books and the scripts he was going to write; the plays he was going to direct. The day when he would be noted publicly as simply Adam Hammond, no longer Adam Hammond, Theodore Hammond's son. He was incandescent with eagerness to dig his teeth into the city and rip off that first audacious bite.

“Wait here, okay?” he said, unfolding to upright and skating on sock feet into our bedroom. Our first, official grown-up bedroom, with the queen bed we'd been waiting six years to share. When he came back, he was practically vibrating. “Now close your eyes and hold out your hand.”

I was expecting anything but a ring. Adam was a generous, creative, and deeply thoughtful gift giver, and he gave them often: every birthday, Valentine's Day, anniversary, was faithfully remembered and acknowledged. And every special occasion in between. For my college graduation a few weeks prior, he'd given me a stunning monograph on the work of Helen Frankenthaler, the artist I'd written my senior thesis about, which had been signed with a few words of congratulation by Helen herself. I had no idea how he'd gotten it; I suspected his parents had been involved. So I thought this was going to be a moving-in gift, a “Here's to finally sharing our own space without parents or roommates” celebration.

Instead, the weight that settled onto my hand belonged to a small velvet box. My breath hitched in my chest when I saw it. I couldn't move, so he did it for me, creaking open the lid to reveal the flawless solitaire inside, sparkling like a captured star.

“I was going to ask you this weekend,” he said. “I had the perfect thing all planned out: a romantic walk in the park, dinner at sunset…but I can't wait. I've been waiting for six years, and I literally cannot wait one more hour. I love you more than anything else on earth, and I want the whole world to know it. I want to make it official. I can't imagine my life without you….Please say you'll share it with me, and marry me.”

The fact that he'd abandoned his plan, which had no doubt been as carefully screenwritten as the night we lost our virginity together, was a testament to the strength of his emotion, and I loved him even more fiercely for it. I clasped his face in my hands, looked into his shining eyes, and said yes.

And I never looked back. Never questioned it. Not when my friends teased me, calling me a boring old fart. Not when my father ruined our post-engagement celebration with Adam's parents at their country house by confessing on the ride home that he thought I was getting married way too young.

“Care Bear, what's wrong with waiting a few more years?” he said.

“Because we've been waiting for so long already. You're acting like I just met him six months ago.”

“I know it's been a long time. But that's because you started dating when you were only kids. You're still very young. You're going to change so much in your twenties, in ways you can't even imagine now. You two may grow apart from each other.”

I rolled my eyes. “Ugh, Dad, we won't. If we were going to grow apart, don't you think we would have done it while we were in school two and a half hours away from each other?”

“Maybe…or maybe not,” he said. “Distance can be hard, but it can also hide a lot of things. You only just finished college; give yourselves a chance to get used to living together. You're going to be together regardless, so why do you need to be married?”

“Because we want to! He wants me to be his
wife,
not his girlfriend. We have complete faith in each other. And we're ready.”

“But you're both going to be meeting so many new people…especially Adam. I just don't see what would be so terrible about putting it off for a couple of years.”

“Dad, you're wasting your breath,” my seventeen-year-old sister Ruby announced from the other side of the backseat. “Caroline is going to do exactly what Caroline wants. We all know that.”

“Ruby, don't be rude,” said our mother. “And Bernard, I don't see why you're making an issue out of this. You and I were
married
at Caroline's age, never mind engaged. She and Adam have certainly proved their commitment to each other by now. And he's such a wonderful young man, from a lovely family.”

My mother's support eased the sting of my father's hesitation. She had been beside herself since the minute I'd called her, still blotting the spot on my shirt from where Adam and I had laughingly tried to drink the Trader Joe's bubbly with our arms intertwined. Of course, she'd been saying “When you and Adam get married” for years now.

My dad sighed. “Of course he's a wonderful young man. Just think about what I'm saying, sweetheart. That's all I ask. I don't want you to ever regret this.”

But by the time I finally did regret it, we were way past the point at which my father had expected us to fracture. We made it through our mid-twenties, through our late twenties, through my art history PhD and Adam's immersion in the psychotic, backstabbing ecosystem of New York's theater world. He agreed, albeit reluctantly, to make the move to Massachusetts a few years ago, and even though we occasionally spent stretches of time as long-distance lovers when he was directing in the city, I had never worried. Adam's love for me was such an intrinsic part of him. And it was a pivotal component of his own image of himself, too: creative genius with beloved muse. I knew him better than anyone else did, or ever could, and he treasured that. Every once in a while, in the aftermath of lovemaking, he would cup my face and whisper,
I love you so much. I don't know what I would ever do without you.

Which, it so happened, were almost the exact words he used in the fifth voicemail he left me on the night I found out about his affair. Or it might have been the sixth; I didn't know. I didn't care. I listened to all of them in the cab on the way to Jonathan's apartment, with the phone on speaker and Jonathan rubbing my arm to try to soothe me. It was a betrayal to let somebody else hear Adam's words, his pleas, his tears. But again, I didn't care. His own betrayal of me was too vast for me to comprehend; this was just a puddle of dirty slush compared to that ocean.

When the cabbie dropped us on Jonathan's street, the air held that clingy, faintly garbage-scented warmth that's particular to late summer in New York City, and the burning orange ball of the sun had yet to drop behind the tracks of the elevated subway a few blocks away. An hour ago, when that sun was only a little higher in the sky, my life, and my future, were exactly what I had always understood them to be. And now, nothing would ever mean the same to me again.

This street, for example. I'd always loved Jonathan's block, in a friendly corner of Astoria like the one I grew up in, where old Greek ladies hung their laundry from their fire escapes and gossiped on their stoops. I'd loved Jonathan's tiny studio apartment with the perpetually unmade bed shoved into one corner to make room for the dining table. But both of them were ruined for me now. They'd always be the shelter I fled to, clutching the shards of my shattered life, because I hadn't been about to head back to Adam's and my little walk-up in Hell's Kitchen. Knowing what must have gone on there, I never wanted to see that place again.

Even Jonathan was going to be different for me now. He'd been so many things to me: my closest friend, the brother I'd never had. My sounding board, my study partner, the one other person I'd known at college with blue-collar parents and a work-study job. And now he was, forever, the vector that brought Adam and his lover together. The first person I told about the affair, in choking sobs against his chest while Adam paced frantically nearby. The one who took care of me, after.

In his bathroom, I scrubbed a towel over my face one last time, and faced my reflection in the rust-edged mirror. Whenever I've been crying, my hazel eyes always look distinctly green—all that puffy pink skin around them. It's a physical trait I share with Adam, along with fair skin and opinionated dark blond hair. Before we were married, people used to mistake us for siblings on a regular basis. I used to like it. Now, even my own face was a reminder of his betrayal.

The takeout Jonathan had ordered while I showered was sitting on the counter when I walked out of the bathroom, but my stomach quivered at the mere suggestion of accepting food.

“Care, you should try to eat something,” Jonathan said.

“Not gonna happen.” I slumped onto his couch, picked up the remote, and started absently clicking through the limited offerings of the broadcast channels. Jonathan wouldn't spring for cable since he basically only came home to sleep.

“Yes,” he said, dropping the carton of
keftedes
on the coffee table next to me and stabbing his index finger at it. “Eat.”

I hissed out a sigh, popped the lid off the box, and picked a minuscule bite from one of the meatballs with the flimsy takeout fork.

“Adam came by while you were in the shower,” said Jonathan. “I told him you didn't want to see him, and to leave you alone until you were ready to talk. I think he will. But he left a letter for you.”

Of course he had. I spotted it, then: on the corner of the coffee table, a single sheet of folded, round-edged paper, unmistakably torn from the Moleskine notebook Adam kept with him at all times. Always the same kind, for as long as I'd known him: black cover, eight inches by five inches, ruled. There were three whole shelves of them in Adam's office at home. Usually the sanctity of the Moleskine was unbreachable; that he had been willing to tear pages from one was an indicator of his distress. An indicator, I should add, that he'd surely known I would recognize.

“Did you read it?” I said to Jonathan.

“Of course not.”

“Good. That makes two of us. It would crush his little soul to know that nobody wants to read his precious fucking words.”

I said it because I thought it would feel powerful, but even as my mouth made the sounds, a wave of disorientation swamped me. It wasn't like me to speak about Adam so acidly. It wasn't what we did, not even in our deepest, darkest fights. But then, he'd never hurt me enough to make me hate him before. Everything about this was uncharted territory…and I was lost in it.

Jonathan flopped down next to me and stretched his legs out on the table. “If it makes you feel better, I laid a load of truth on him about what a despicable thing this was to do. I lit into him pretty fierce.”

“Can't imagine he enjoyed that.” Contrary to the stereotype about redheads having hot tempers, Jonathan goes cold-mad. I'm talking punishing, withering scorn. The bitterest medicine for a sensitive person like Adam. He must have felt about three inches tall by the time Jonathan got done with him. In spite of myself, I felt a flicker of sympathy.