Days of Awe (20 page)

His touch was cold bone on bone, unbearable. I closed my eyes and waited for him to stop.

I composed the e-mail to Alex Cortez and stored it for a week in my drafts folder. I finally hit
SEND
late Sunday night. He wrote back to me twenty minutes later.

Dear Isabel, I'm not sure I'll have any answers for you, but I would like to meet. I think about Josie every day.

I knew what it was like for a teacher with young kids in the middle of summer, the vacation you could hardly wait for that morphed into a black hole. I suggested we meet the next day, Monday. He agreed immediately.

“I'm just going to do some errands,” I said to Chris that morning, although he hadn't asked. He was sitting at the kitchen table eating a bagel and tapping away at his computer, working before he left for work. The emerald ash borer was attacking trees throughout the city, and the DNR couldn't get ahead of it. They were cutting down trees in all of the southern neighborhoods. Chris was mapping the damage, stricken. He took it personally.

“Uh, we're out of cream cheese,” he said, his mouth full. “If you're, uh, if you're…”
Tap tap tap.

“Going to the store. Yes,” I said, cementing my lie. I felt like I was going to meet a lover. But how could I have explained this to Chris?
I'm going to meet the man Josie might have been having an affair with, so I can feel closer to my dead best friend?
I need to speak with someone who loved her, even if that someone might be a bastard?
I'm off to learn some sordid information about Josie, because, did you know, I think maybe discovering something new about her is the only way I'll be able to stop being sad for a second?

I grabbed my grocery list from the counter and scrawled
cream cheese
on it. Now I'd have to stop at Engman's on the way home. “Are we out of anything else?”

The summer was already unbearably hot, and on the days when it wasn't ninety degrees, it was raining, an almost-continual bleak warm drizzle. Alex had asked if we could meet at Wee Bounce, an indoor playground for toddlers on the outskirts of the city.

“I apologize in advance,” he wrote. “This place is probably a Petri dish for antibiotic-resistant Staph, and I can absolutely testify that the decibel level will crush your soul. But I'll have my kids with me, and this is the only place where you and I might have a fighting chance of claiming a few minutes to talk. Plus it's air-conditioned and they have a coffee bar.”

“No problem,” I wrote back quickly, smiling. “I remember what it's like.” I had the disconcerting feeling that I would have agreed to meet him anywhere: a drug den, a strip club.

Traffic was light, and I began to relax into the drive, that amorphous dream time. I didn't know what I was going to say to Alex Cortez. I wasn't certain about what had happened between him and Josie, but whatever it was, it had been going on for a while. She had mentioned him in the months since her confession at the beach, but always in a false, polished way, as if she were talking about a movie she'd seen or telling a story about an acquaintance. As if she'd never tried to show me her heart.
My friend Alex Cortez. That teacher I know in Madison, Alex. Remember?
She referred to him in the same way she spoke about the nice woman in her pottery class, the friendly barista with the glasses, her dentist. But they'd had an affair, and my hunch was that he'd ended it, cruelly, setting her downward spiral in motion.

Every year I explain to my fifth graders the debate about the art versus the artist: Can you love a work of art if the person who produced it was truly awful? Wagner hated Jews. Picasso mistreated his wives. Dickens was a rotten husband and a crummy father. Most of my students, preteen moral absolutists, come down quickly and vehemently against the reprehensible artist. But there are always one or two—the boy with the alcoholic mother, the girl whose father sends her a check for her birthday and Christmas—who reluctantly raise their hands in favor of ambiguity, of siphoning what is beautiful from an imperfect source.

Would meeting Alex Cortez be like loving “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”?

Maybe I wanted to tell him to his face that he was a bastard. But maybe I just wanted to weep in his arms.

I pulled into the parking lot of Wee Bounce—a ramshackle little storefront sandwiched between Re-Pete's Secondhand Sports on one side and Good Imported Russian Foods on the other—and slid out of my car into a gasp of concrete heat. Madison is always ten degrees hotter than Milwaukee in the summer, without the breeze off Lake Michigan to cool the relentless midwestern swelter. I was unprepared for it, although I shouldn't have been—the hydrogen blast of it and that quick grip of panic, the feeling of being trapped inside a hair dryer.

I walked into Wee Bounce and stood still for a minute in the lobby, becoming acclimated to the cooler temperature and the soundtrack of rising screams. I paid my entrance fee to a friendly, wide-faced, blond teenager and peeked through the doorway. It was just one vast room, and it was already jammed with careening toddlers, even at nine thirty on a Monday morning. There were four big, bright bouncy castles lining the walls, and in the middle, like a moat, was a carpeted play area surrounded by worn beige couches. In the far corner there was a tiny cordoned-off coffee bar, really just a countertop, behind which another teenager, this one with dyed green hair, rested on her elbows and gazed out into the middle distance.

Wee Bounce was a terrible, terrible place, a teeming nest of horrors, a dungeon of chaos. But Alex Cortez was right: it was nicely air-conditioned. I walked across the lobby and into the main room.

It smelled like vinyl and diapers and desperation. There were so many women, and as I scanned for Alex Cortez I recognized on all of their varied faces that acute maternal focus, the sweaty rigor of it. They were so young, these mothers of toddlers: ten, fifteen years younger than I was. They looked like my students, clear eyed and inexperienced, dear as kittens. They wore shorts and had their hair in ponytails, and they dashed around after their children.
Careful, Eloise!
Jackson, stop licking your sister!

I had the sudden, quick swipe of a memory, there in the middle of Toddler Cage Match, of being at the grocery store with Hannah when she was two or three years old. She was sitting in the cart, facing me, her fat legs dangling, her face red, and she was howling. I had probably denied her something amazing: a toothpick, a penny, a bottle of Drano. It didn't matter. Sometimes it just went that way, the innocuous, pleasant moment becoming, without warning, deadly.

“I DO NOT LIKE YOU!” Hannah screamed. And I was sweating, frantic, trying to grab a few essential items from the shelves, knowing that the mission had to be aborted. I flew down the juice aisle and tried to dodge an older woman, who stood her ground and glared at me.

“Excuse me,” I said. She scowled. I angled my cart away from hers.
Grouchy old bat.

But she reached out for me and touched my elbow. Hannah was screeching so loudly I thought I might permanently lose hearing; she scrunched her face, paused, and took a cleansing breath, gearing up for more.

“The days are long,” the old lady said, nodding. “But the years are short.”

Hannah's wails pierced the air. I smiled, and the old lady smiled back. And I thought:
Please, please, get the hell out of my way.

I kept searching the room for Alex Cortez and had the fleeting thought that he was standing me up. I was wearing a light green T-shirt, black capris, sneakers—the summer uniform of the fortysomething female. I had smeared on some under-eye concealer this morning and a swish of mascara, and I realized now that I had wanted to impress Alex Cortez, and also that I would not. I felt old and out of place and, worse, shocked to feel that way. As if on cue, a woman carrying a small, crying child knocked into me as she rushed past and murmured, “Oh, I'm sorry, ma'am.”

I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Isabel?”

Yes, I did remember him. Not too tall. Extremely white teeth. Straight nose, angular cheekbones. A face so symmetrical and well assembled, he looked factory-made. He smiled at me.
Oh, Josie.

He held two Styrofoam cups of coffee and led me toward the play area. A little girl trailed behind him and, holding her hand, a wobbly toddler in overall shorts. They were giggling, delighted with themselves, as adorable as ducklings. Alex set the coffees down on a low table and reached out to shake my hand, squeezed it, and my pulse sped up with the knowledge that this stranger knew Josie, too; that he had a piece of her.

“I thought you might need sustenance,” he said, and gestured to the coffee on the table.

“Thanks.”

The little girl tugged on her father's T-shirt. She looked like a lighter version of Alex, the same face but with red hair, pale skin, eyes so green the villagers would have burned her at the stake a few hundred years ago. “I wanna play, Daddy.”

I remembered Josie, at the beach, talking about Alex's children in an overfamiliar way, as if she were a beloved aunt.
And he has two older girls, too, Maya and Elena, so his work's cut out for him!
I smiled at her. “Is this Maya?” I asked.

“Ah, no. Maya's in first grade. She's at day camp this morning.” Alex looked at me, and I saw what I hadn't noticed at first: guardedness, nervous suspicion. “This is Elena, and this is my guy, Antonio.” He rested his hand on top of Antonio's head with a sweet, tender possessiveness: he loved them all, you could tell; but this one, oh, this one. “Go play,” he said. And, to Elena, “Make sure you hold your brother's hand. Remember there are big kids here, and he's very little.” He watched them run off and almost crash into a herd of children, skidding away at the last second, and then he turned to me. “I can't look. It's crazy here. I warned you.”

I took a sip of my coffee, which was lukewarm and tasted like ashes. I peeked under the lid, wondering if someone had possibly flicked a cigarette into it.

“It's really bad coffee,” Alex said. “It used to be better, maybe? Or maybe when the babies weren't sleeping through the night I was just more desperate.”

I took another sip. “No, it's fine. It's good. I mean, caffeine, right? Who doesn't love it?” I thought about setting my cup down, getting a running start, and hopping from bouncy house to bouncy house and then bouncing right out the Wee Bounce front door.
Thank you for the coffee! This was a mistake! Goodbye!

“I'm very glad that we're meeting,” Alex said quietly, “even if it's just so I can tell you in person that I'm sorry I didn't go to Josie's funeral.” I started to interrupt, but he shook his head. “I just have to say this,” he said. “I'm ashamed to admit that I had planned to lie to you. I was going to say that I didn't find out that she died until weeks later. But she…ah, we were in contact, you know, pretty regularly, and…Mark. He called me. Two days after she died. He didn't know that Josie and I…I guess Josie had mentioned me, as a colleague. He got in touch and he asked me to make some phone calls. So I did that. Isabel, I was stunned. I still am.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his eyes intently on mine. He was relieved to have confessed. “I know how close you two were.”

I nodded. I felt the first shivers of a perfect, icy rage.

On the drive to Madison, I had considered walking into Wee Bounce and just launching my whole quiver of arrows at him:
You ruined Josie's marriage, you undermined our friendship, you're a liar and a shithead and you're the reason she's gone.
But when I practiced my speech in the car I kept getting stuck. I couldn't think of the word for a married man who has an affair with a married woman. It wasn't “infidel,” was it? Now, staring into the pool of Alex Cortez's dark, dreamy eyes, it came to me.

I took another sip of my coffee. I began to resign myself to its awfulness, and, simultaneously, I started thinking maybe it wasn't so bad. I glanced at one of the bouncy houses, all the flailing little arms and legs—a huge, multilimbed dragon, trapped in a puffy castle—and wondered if you could mark the exact moment in your life when jumping around on bright inflated plastic stopped being enough.

Alex smiled and waved to his children as they bounced into view. “DaddyDaddylookatme!” Elena screamed, then bounced back out of sight. A hank of Alex's thick, dark hair fell across his forehead as he glanced down to discreetly check his phone.

“This place is pure childhood,” I said. “What's the adult equivalent? A wine bar?”

He looked up at me with a polite, quizzical smile.

Josie would have run with it, would have picked up my cue.
A documentary about experimental jazz,
she would have said,
followed by a brief Q and A with the director.
What had she seen in him, besides his absurdly good looks? What about this Ken doll had moved her so profoundly that she was willing to jeopardize everything?

“I've been immersed in my kids' lives for so long,” Alex said, “I don't even remember what adults do for fun.”

I didn't know it was going to come out of my mouth until it was too late. “Adults,” I said, “commit adultery.” On the other hand, I suppose maybe I did.

I rubbed my hands up and down my goose-bumped arms and stared at my pants, a faded black cotton-spandex blend stretching across my thighs. I thought Alex might just get up and leave, might round up his children and hustle them out of Wee Bounce and back into the inferno of the parking lot. I thought, at the very least, he would probably gather his things and move as far away from me as he could.

But he just sighed. “I'm not as much of an asshole as you probably think.”

I shrugged.
How much of an asshole are you?
“Before she met you, she was happily married and alive.” I knew it sounded ridiculous even as I said it.