Still Life with Husband (23 page)

When we e-mail, we don’t talk about anything in particular. Sometimes, but less often than I would have thought before I had an affair, our e-mails are graphic. “Remember what you did to me yesterday? Remember the popsicle?” I try, but I can’t take it seriously, our version of cybersex, our pornographic haikus. “Yes, that popsicle was good.” And I get easily confused. What we did yesterday: Was it hot? Was it cold? Should I ask? More often than not, I steer the conversation back to familiar terrain. “Speaking of popsicles, it’s supposed to be unseasonably warm next week!” I’ve never been comfortable talking about sex, although I’ve always enjoyed conversation during it. Once, in the middle of making love, I asked Kevin how his day had been. He stopped, pushed away from me, and sighed. “Emily,” he said, “I was kind of in the moment there.”

Instead David and I tell each other about our daily lives. I try to make mine sound lively and unpredictable by distilling a series of long, boring moments into charming anecdotes. I don’t tell him about the forty-seven manuscripts I logged and labeled. I tell him about the graduate student who stopped me in the hallway on Monday, grabbed my wrist, and said, “You look exactly like Cher! Before her plastic surgery!” I don’t tell him about the two-hour collating project I undertook to help Dick organize his office. I tell him about Dr. Viktor Yiannous, the brilliant but volatile researcher in the lab next door to the journal who, furious that his experiment had failed, pulled the fire alarm in a fit of pique and set off the science building’s sprinkler system.

His e-mails to me are usually longer, a little bit sloppier. He discusses the newsroom in detail, complains about his colleagues, describes his latest article about Milwaukee’s mayoral race, about the current scandal rocking the city’s sanitation department, about anything, about nothing.

Sometimes I write about my husband. I tell David that Kevin skipped dinner one night recently in order to attend a seminar on mortgages, that he has stopped even pretending to hear my objections to moving away from the city and into a subdivision. I write about how we hung around the apartment last Sunday but only said 172 words to each other the entire day; I counted. But in the messed-up moral cosmology that is an affair, I try to stay somehow ethical when it comes to saying too much about Kevin. I feel—there’s no other way to put it—
loyal
to him. So I don’t tell David what I need most to confess: that lately the thought of actually spending the rest of my life with my husband knocks the wind out of me so hard I sometimes can’t breathe. This, I keep to myself.

When it gets late, and our messages have become shorter and shorter, one of us finally says good-bye.

“I can’t wait to see you again,” David will write.

“Me, too.” I’ll write back, and then I’ll hit “send,” and the truest words of the night will disappear from the screen in an instant.

MY MOTHER IS HAVING A ROOT CANAL. SHE’S BEEN PUTTING IT
off for months, so my dad wouldn’t let her cancel, despite her protestations. My mother’s teeth are prone to cracking under the slightest pressure, like cowardly spies, and to spectacular rotting, despite her excellent oral hygiene; she seems to need a root canal every three or four months. Because of the frequency of her visits to the dentist, or maybe in spite of it, she’s made my dad come with her: for molar support, he says. And Kevin is home fast asleep. He didn’t come to bed until 3:00 a.m. The squeak of the door woke me up as he tiptoed into our room, and I rolled over and looked at him. He was grayish and out of sorts, and he mumbled, as he climbed stiffly into bed, that he had gotten caught up in a late, late movie, and then he rolled over without another word and sighed deeply. This is why I find myself alone at the airport at nine-thirty on a cold Saturday morning in November. I’m meeting Heather.

Like every other family, we’re mostly just a rerun of ourselves. I always feel giddy and excited before Heather comes to visit, then blurry and inarticulate while she’s here, then surly and pissed off when she’s gone. Right now, I’m at gate 32E, breathing in the airport smell of Starbucks and shoe leather, standing behind a freakishly short family, waiting for Heather to walk off the plane. I’m bouncing a little, standing on my tiptoes, although there’s no need to, since no one in the family in front of me could possibly be taller than five-foot-three. Like a limo driver meeting a CEO, I’m carrying a sign for Heather. This one reads
ANITA MANN
. Others, in our history of airport pickups, have included Pat Hetic, M. T. Headed, and Drew P. Drorrs. Heather and I subsist on a diet of silly inside jokes and old habits. I’m beaming at the uniformed check-in ladies, at the luggage cart drivers, at every overburdened traveler who catches my eye. I can’t wait to see my sister.

Ten minutes later, I’m still waiting, poking my head as far around the corner as I can: it looks like everyone has disembarked, but there’s no Heather to be found. She must have missed her flight. I can’t believe it. The man standing next to me rushed to his girlfriend as she stepped off the plane and swept her into a passionate embrace five minutes ago; they’re still going at it a few feet away. A blond woman got off the plane, and a small Asian child nearby raced into her arms, buried her head in the woman’s neck. The short family surrounded an improbably tall man who had to bend double to receive their kisses. They’re all long gone. Still no Heather. I look around, wonder if she’s playing a joke on me, realize that that would be difficult, since I’ve watched every single passenger walk off the ramp and into the terminal. My cardboard placard is resting at my feet, defeated, a joke fallen flat.

And then there she is, walking slowly down the ramp, the last person off the plane. Heather, my beautiful sister, her hair thick and shiny and pulled back into a heavy ponytail at the nape of her elegant neck, her camel-colored coat buttoned all the way up, her long legs loping toward me: it’s like seeing a gazelle version of myself. Heather, my partner in crime, my companion, my confidante. It hits me in a flash: I’m going to tell her about David Keller. We’ll put our curly heads together and I’ll whisper my secret to her, and she’ll know what to say. Who ever would have thought that I’d be the one with the unpredictable life? Heather sees me and raises her hand in a gleeful wave. “I fell asleep on the plane!” she calls. “I’m so sorry!” My sister has always enjoyed her naps.

She waves some more. I see her, she sees me, but she keeps waving. I wave back. Then she tilts her head to the side and waggles her fingers dramatically, and I finally notice it: the diamond on her finger. In the fluorescent airport lighting, it practically winks at me. It takes a second for the stubborn synapses in my head to make the impossible connection: my sister, the impulsive troublemaker, the renegade Ross, my sister is engaged.

My mouth drops open, and an “Eeeeeeeee!” that Becky and Angie would be proud of escapes from it. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” I scream, as Heather throws herself into my arms.

“Memma,” she says, calling me by the name she used before she could say Emily, an echo of our primitive connection. “Can you believe it?” She kisses my ear. “Can you even believe it?”

I squeeze her. “Tell me Every. Single. Detail. How did it happen? When is the wedding? Why didn’t you tell me over the phone?” I squeeze her again. “Did Sam propose? How did he do it? Where did he do it? When did he do it?”

She pulls back from our dancing hug. Love for her washes over me. We study each other for a second. My God, she has good skin. My baby sister is getting married. She smiles, but sheepishly. “Erm…yeeaaahhhh,” she says, drawing it out into a long syllable, like a deflating balloon. “Yeahhh. Well, see, Mem, it’s not exactly…it’s not…” She chews on her lip for a second. “Well, it’s not Sam.”

Not Sam? She’s engaged, but not to Sam? My hard drive is crashing. My brain is full of squiggly lines and indecipherable characters. “Can we sit down somewhere?” she asks, and without waiting for an answer, she hoists her suitcase, takes me by the hand, and pulls me away from the terminal. We head for the coffee shop at the end of the corridor.

In line, we don’t talk. My brain is still struggling to reboot. Heather is intent on the task at hand: ordering herbal tea, dunking the teabag; pouring what seems to be a very specific amount of honey into her cup. I order a black coffee, set it down on the table, and look at it for a while. Finally, Heather says, quietly, “It’s all been kind of crazy.”

“I bet it has,” I say. “What happened?” It’s so strange to be here with my little sister, in a crowded airport coffee shop, so strange to be surrounded by the bustle of travelers as we sit in our vacuum of stillness, as I wait for the gory details of Heather’s crazy life. I lean toward her, prop my chin on my elbows, as curious as I’ve ever been in my life. “What on earth happened?”

She blows on her tea. “Before I tell you, can you please promise not to judge me?”

I feel myself snarl at Heather before I can stop my lips from curling. “That is so mean,” I say, recoiling. “I don’t
judge
you!” I do, of course. “I can’t even believe you’d start with that, after we haven’t even seen each other in—”

She cuts me off. “Emily, I don’t want to fight with you. Can we skip all of this, please? All of this I’m-the-unreliable-one, you’re-the-good-girl crap? I just want to tell you about what have been probably the most important and…” She waves her left hand again, this time in an attempt to find the right word. “…fateful few months of my life. I just want you to be my sister and listen to me.”

I sigh. There’s so much rivalrous, disputable history in what she just said. I could lead a group of scouts through the twisted underbrush of those accusations. For God’s sake, I’m not the good girl! But Heather looks tired again, and I realize that she has a point. “’Kay.”

“Well!” she says, buoyed by my easy capitulation. “I met him…and by the way, Mom and Dad don’t know. I met him on a business trip to Colorado.” Since when does Heather take business trips? What does she even do for a living these days? Last I knew, she was working in a bakery. “We had this crazy fling in Boulder,” she continues, “and I can’t explain it. It just felt right. And it happened so fast,” she says, her eyes wide, as if, in telling me the story, she’s surprised by it herself. “We both just knew it.” And I think of David Keller, and I want to clap my hands together and shout,
“I know what you mean!,”
but do I? I’m not exactly registering for fine china with David Keller. Of course, I
am
already married. “So I told Sam,” she continues without pausing, without, I think, even breathing, “which totally sucked, I still feel totally awful about that, and I moved out of the apartment, and then I moved in with Rolf.”

“What,” I say slowly, still trying to process the barrage of information that has just come at me. “What…what kind of business trip was it?” It’s all I can think to ask.

Heather doesn’t miss a beat. “Did I tell you I got promoted at work? The Reeds—they’re the couple that owns the bakery, ’member?—made me the morning manager. Of course I was the only person who worked the morning shift, and they didn’t give me a raise, so it was meaningless, except for I got to go on this trip. It was the first annual Tiny Business Management Conference, for establishments of two or fewer employees. It was totally lame. Of course, after I met Rolf I didn’t end up going to half of the workshops, but they sounded lame. ‘Synergizing Your Very Small Staff,’ ‘Your Employee, Yourself.’ Rolf,” she continues proudly, “owns the only kosher-style deli in Minneapolis.”

“Rolf,” I say. The name is a tennis lob on my tongue that stops at my front teeth. Kosher-style deli?

Heather takes a huge swig of tea. “Rolf is sixth-generation Swedish! He has more than one employee, of course, but he was giving the keynote address. He’s very successful,” she says proudly, glancing, unintentionally I’m sure, at her ring. “So then, anyway, I got fired. Because the Reeds found out I blew off the whole stupid conference. Because Jessie, the girl who works afternoons, was there. She got promoted, too. Anyway, she ratted me out. Which I was totally pissed about, but in the end it was actually for the best, because now I’m working at Rolf’s deli, and we’re together all the time!”

“Heather, I—” I don’t know what to ask her, but there must be more questions.

“Wait, just wait. There’s one more thing.” She takes a deep breath, licks her lips.

“More?” I ask. I feel my mouth drop open a little bit, and I press my lips back together.

“Rolf is…well, he’s a little bit older than I am.”

“How much older?” I ask evenly.

She licks her lips again, as if she’s tasting how old Rolf is. “He’s, um, kind of in his late thirties.”

“Late thirties,” I say, waiting. “How late?”

“He’s forty-three.”

“Heather! He’s fifteen years older than you!” It shoots out of my mouth like a bullet before I can stop myself, and she immediately glares, leans back in her chair, crosses her arms over her chest. “I’m sorry,” I say quickly. “It’s not that big a deal! I mean, fifteen years, so what? Right?” I do quick, silent calculations: he’ll be a doddering, forgetful seventy-year-old when Heather’s a trim fifty-five. She’ll probably be running marathons and mastering tae-kwon-do, and he’ll need one of those little beeping plastic containers to remind him to take his pills. He’ll be one-hundred-five when Heather’s a spry ninety! “That’s no big deal!” I say again.

“And he has a toddler,” she mumbles, so fast I’m not sure I’ve heard her correctly.

“A rottweiler?” I ask, hopefully.

“No,” Heather says, finally smiling at me again, this time the toothiest grin, a smile like she’s swallowed the whole word. “A toddler. A little boy. Silas. He’s…he’s three. He’s a terrific kid. I’m going to be a stepmommy. A stepmommy!”

I close my eyes.

“Rolf has joint custody with Salomé, his ex-partner,” Heather continues.

Forty-three. Stepmommy. Salomé. Ex-partner. Oh, God. “Congratulations,” I tell her calmly, as neutrally as I can manage. “That’s wonderful.” I look around, take in the panorama of travelers who are rushing past the coffee shop toward their gates, the people at tables near us who are not Receiving Momentous News, who are simply having coffee.