She, Myself & I (22 page)

“But you don’t have to deal with it by yourself. When I’m home, I help,” Aidan said.

“I know. You’ve just been working so much lately.”

He shrugged. “I can’t help that. It’s not like I’m working for fun.”

“I know. But it’s like that song, ‘Cat’s in the Cradle.’ You need to spend more time with Ben.”

“I am not a ‘Cat’s in the Cradle’ dad, and I spend plenty of time with Ben. What I need to do is to spend more time with you. We used to laugh and hang out together every night, and I can’t even remember the last time we slept together.”

“When I was six and a half months pregnant with Ben,” I said.

“You came up with that answer pretty quickly. How do you remember?”

“Because I had to beg you. Wait, though . . . are you saying that you wish Ben hadn’t been born?” I asked.

“No! Of course not! But I think we need to spend some time together on our own, too,” Aidan said.

“I tried to set that up last week. Remember? You made plans to have dinner with your family instead,” I said.

“Don’t remind me,” Aidan said. “Can we try again? Maybe see if one of our moms or sisters will babysit this weekend? What are grandmothers for, anyway?”

I nodded and took the hand that he was extending to me. “Maybe we should ask your mom. I think Paige has her hands full right now, and I’m trying to avoid my mom.”

“Your parents are dating,” Aidan teased me.

“Ugh, don’t remind me. And don’t joke about it.”

“Your parents are dating. Your parents are dating,” Aidan sang out obnoxiously.

“I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you,” I said, and clapped my hands over my ears. “Nananana, I can’t hear you.”

“Not only are they dating, they’re probably having sex,” Aidan said.

“Ack! How can you say that?” I shrieked, and I rolled on top of him, straddling his body. “Just for that, I’m going to tickle-attack you.”

I dug my fingers into his ribs and tickled him until his eyes watered up and he begged me to stop.

“Okay, okay, I give up. I promise, I’ll stop talking about your parents having S-E-X,” he said, and then he reached up and grabbed my wrists. “Speaking of S-E-X . . .”

“What about it?”

“Do you feel like having it?’

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Come here,” Aidan said.

And he pulled me toward him, and we kissed. He struggled to get my T-shirt off over my head.

“Wait,” I said.

“Oh no,” Aidan said.

“No, I want to, it’s just . . . I don’t want you to see me naked,” I said.

“Well, I know it’s been a while since we did this, but if memory serves me, I think that nudity is sort of a requirement.”

“Can’t I just leave my shirt on?”

“Why? I love seeing you naked,” Aidan said.

He log-rolled me over and began nuzzling my neck.

“I’m embarrassed.”

“I have seen you naked before, you know.”

“But my stomach is all flobby now.”

“I don’t think that’s a real word.”

“The skin is all loose and pouchy. It’s embarrassing.”

“Let me see.”

“No!”

“Come on, let me see.” Aidan pulled my T-shirt up, exposing the jiggling looseness of my stomach. He leaned over and tenderly kissed it. “I think it’s beautiful.”

“No you don’t. I have stretch marks, and my belly button is black from all of the dead skin cells. And I’m fat,” I said, and I tried to stretch the T-shirt back down, wanting to hide the disgusting mess that was my body.

“Hey,” Aidan said softly. He reached over and placed his hand on mine. “That’s where you carried our son. It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.”

I rested a hand on the side of his face, trying to remember what it was about him that had been irritating me so much lately.

“Okay,” I said, sitting up and peeling off my shirt.

“Hot damn!” Aidan said.

Chapter Twenty-four

“Thanks for coming over,” I said, opening the door for Cora and Beatrice.

“No problem. She’s asleep. Can I put her down somewhere?”

“Sure. Ben is napping in his room, but I have a Pack ’n Play set up in the family room. Is that okay?”

“Sure. Wow. Your house is gorgeous. Who took these pictures of Ben for you?” Cora asked, stopping by the matted, framed black-and-white photographs I’d hung in the front hall.

“I did.”

“Are you serious? They’re amazing! Are you a professional photographer?”

“God, no. I majored in photography in college, but I never did any real work. Just artsy stuff for class. Most of it’s awful—extreme close-ups of leaves, and pretentious stuff like that,” I said.

“Well, I think you’re really talented. You know, people would pay you a lot of money to take pictures like this of their kids,” Cora said.

“No. Really? You think so?”

“Yup. In fact, I’ll be your first customer. Would you photograph Beatrice? In black and white? I’ll pay you.”

“Of course! But you don’t have to pay me, silly goose,” I said.

“Yes I do. And then you can use Ben’s and Beatrice’s pictures to start a portfolio. They’re having a baby expo at the convention center in a few months. I went last year when I was pregnant, and there were a ton of photographers there displaying their work, and none of them were as good as these,” Cora insisted.

“I don’t know. That sounds like a lot of . . . trouble,” I said.

Cora shrugged. “It’s up to you,” she said.

I felt the regret catch in my chest. Why had I said it would be too much trouble? My hesitation flowed from a wild-eyed fear that if I did try to make something of what had once been my passion, and had in recent years dried up to a part-time hobby, I would fail.

“Well, maybe I should try,” I said lamely, but Cora just smiled, and it seemed like the moment—and the opportunity—had passed.

After Cora had settled Beatrice into the Pack ’n Play, and accepted the coffee I’d made especially for her—I’d never seen anyone ingest as much caffeine before in my life—I said, “The computer is upstairs, in Aidan’s office.”

“Okay, cool. I just can’t believe you don’t know how to use the Internet.”

“I don’t. I don’t even have e-mail.”

“You do know you can shop online, right?”

“You can?” I asked. “No, but if I had, I would have done this sooner.”

We walked up the open staircase, and once upstairs, I pushed open the second door on the right.

“Sorry it’s such a mess in here. This room sort of became the dumping grounds for all of our random stuff when we moved in,” I said, waving my hand to indicate the boxes of files, Aidan’s golf clubs, the treadmill I’d insisted on buying and had only used three times. “I don’t even know how to turn the thing on.”

Cora settled in behind Aidan’s desk and hit a button on the computer. I stood behind her, leaning over her shoulder. The computer began to whir and beep, and a minute later, the blue desktop screen appeared.

“You have a high-speed Internet connection, so all you have to do is open the browser—that’s this button here—and voilà! Here’s the Internet.”

“You make it look so easy.”

“It is. Now, to research something, you just have to type it here in the search box. What did you want to look up? Cruises?”

“Yeah, I’m going to surprise Aidan with a trip. There are some weekend cruises that depart from Houston, and I thought it would be fun for us to get away together,” I said.

“Are you going to bring Ben?”

“I’m not sure. My mom said she’d watch him, but I’m nervous at the idea of leaving him. Do you think I should take him with us?”

“Hell, no. Have a romantic weekend, you guys probably need it. Ben will be fine. Okay, here are some websites where you can book cruises. This one here is a discount travel website, where they have cruises that have been marked down, and this one is a general travel site, which is going to have everything,” Cora explained.

“How do I find these websites again?” I asked.

“You right-click on ‘Favorites’ and then scroll down to ‘Add to Favorites.’ There, it’s right . . . oh.”

“What?”

“Um. This is your husband’s computer?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Well. This is really none of my business, but most of the websites he has marked as favorites look a little . . . porny,” Cora said.

“Porny? What do you mean?”

“Look: pussygalore.com, boobweb.com, Hustlervip.com, cumshots.com . . .”

As she read the list of websites, nausea began to roll and gurgle in my stomach. I closed my eyes, wanting to blot this moment out of my memory. But I could tell by the way everything seemed too bright, too loud, too in focus that it would stick, just like the night when I was a freshman in college and walked in on my roommate, Meryl, giving my boyfriend, Brad, a blow job. On
my
bed, so that her sheets wouldn’t get sticky.

“I take it you didn’t know about this,” Cora said.

“That my husband’s a porn freak? No, I did not know that,” I said thinly.

“It’s not a big deal. Jason buys
Playboy
every once in a while. I found one in his briefcase, and he trotted out that lame-ass excuse about only being interested in the articles,” Cora said.

“Are there articles on those websites?”

“I don’t know. Let’s look and see.”

Cora scrolled the mouse down the list of marked websites and clicked on one. Immediately the screen was full of naked women—naked women masturbating, naked women kissing other naked women, naked women performing blow jobs on faceless men, naked women posing in fuck-me heels with come-hither pouts stretched over their plastic faces, all set against a bright pink background with coy captions in a juvenile bubbly font:
Blonde hotties work a cock! College girl spreads her pussy! Big titted girl sucks and fucks!
The copy for the site depended heavily on multiple exclamation points, the letter
X,
and advertised videos, photographs, a live chat, and something called a “dorm cam.”

“What’s a dorm cam?” I asked faintly.

“Erm. I think it’s where they put some cameras around a house, filming the women 24/7. You know . . . having sex, showering, going to the bathroom,” Cora said.

“Ew! Going to the bathroom? Aidan watches women going to the bathroom? I think I’m going to be sick,” I said.

“No, I’m sure he doesn’t. He probably just watches the movies and looks at the pictures,” Cora assured me.

As though the image of my husband masturbating to naked sluts writhing on his computer screen would be comforting.

Suddenly a small window popped up on the screen, announced by an electronic beep. At the top, in white type against a blue background, it read,
Instant Message,
and below, against the white background of the text box, were the words:
Cherry: hi big boy. wanna play?

“Who the hell is that?” I asked.

Cora was silent. I took in her pale, pinched expression and her obvious mortification at tripping into another couple’s marital mess, and suddenly knew.

“It’s a woman, isn’t it? Someone who knows Aidan,” I said, the nausea spreading outward into my limbs. My chest constricted, and dagger-sharp pains prickled down my arms. Was this what it felt like to have a heart attack? Wasn’t I too young for the chest-clenching symptoms normally reserved for fifty-year-old men with rolls of belly fat and a habit of washing their fillet-o-fish sandwiches down with beer?

“I think I’m having a heart attack,” I said, and I leaned back against the wall.

“No, you’re not. It’s just anxiety,” Cora said.

“I’ve had panic attacks before. This is different,” I gasped.

Cora fished around in her diaper bag and retrieved a brown prescription pill bottle. She spun open the top and tapped out a small white pill into the palm of her hand. “Here, take one of these.”

“What is it?”

“A Xanax.”

“Can I take this while breastfeeding?” I asked, swallowing the pill before she could answer.

“Well, technically, no, although it’s a pretty low dosage. But if you’re worried, just pump and dump your breast milk,” Cora said.

The computer emitted another beep. Cora and I peered at the screen. Another message had popped up:
Cherry: R U there? I’m hornee.

“A slut who can’t spell ‘horny,’ ” Cora murmured.

“Should we respond?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” Cora said.

She began typing:
Who are you, and why are you sending whorish messages to my husband?

When the message popped up in the dialogue box under Cherry’s two messages, the sender was listed as “12inches.”

“At least he’s lying to her, too,” I quipped—
How can I be making jokes at a time like this?
—and Cora snorted.

We waited a minute, and then a message popped up:
Cherry: Who r u calling whore bitch? I’ll kick your bony little ass.

“Obviously she doesn’t know me,” I said tightly. “Bony little ass. I wish.”

“What should I say?” Cora asked. “Do you want information from her, or do you want to insult her?”

What I wanted was to kick Aidan in the balls. Hard. A clichéd response to a husband’s infidelity, yes, but oh so satisfying. I looked down at my hands and noticed they were shaking, but I couldn’t figure out if it was from shock or rage. The first was starting to ebb, while the other leapt like a flame.