Fly Away Home (14 page)

“First year. Which you’d think would mean I’d know better.”

She grasped his toes. “What happened? Should I see the other guy?”

“Guys, plural. A bunch of them, in sequins. Well, technically, the other guy is a Firestone tire.” Doug sighed. “Can we just say it’s a rugby injury?” He looked at his ankle sadly. “This is very undignified.” Diana took notes as he told her what happened. The story involved a late-night pub crawl and an eventual altercation with some Mummers getting in an early-morning rehearsal under the I-95 overpass near Reed Street. “I mean, they were wearing dresses. How were we supposed to know we weren’t supposed to whistle?” Doug asked, aggrieved. “We’re not from here.”

“Ah.” If Doug had asked, he would have learned that the Mummers were, at least publicly, hard-core heterosexuals from South Philadelphia who rehearsed all year long and then, every New Year’s, went parading down Broad Street dressed in gaudy skirts trimmed with feathers and sequins. Some played stringed instruments, and others did dance routines. Almost all of them got ferociously drunk and several invariably wound up in the ER, where they’d celebrate the first day of a new year hooked up to IVs, vomiting into the kidney-shaped bedpans and praying for divine intervention. “So I take it there was a fight?”

“Words were exchanged.” Doug considered. “You think I’m going to get in trouble?”

“For fighting with Mummers? If it was up to me, I’d give you a medal.” She rotated the ankle, first to the left, then right, holding his toes and flexing and then pronating the foot. His skin was warm, and there was a dusting of hair, light brown and crisply curling, on his ankles and his calves. “How’s the pain? One to ten.”

“Five … ooh, that’s a six,” he said, as she manipulated his ankle. “Seven. Ow.”

“I think it’s probably just bruising. I’m going to send you for an X-ray, but I think you’re okay. For now, I’d keep icing it.”

“Will do,” he said … and unless she was crazy, he was giving her the kind of appreciative look that men gave to women when they found them interesting. But that wasn’t happening … was it?

“A nurse will give you an Ace bandage, and one of the PAs will hook you up with crutches.” She patted his good leg—professionally, she told herself; she’d touch any of her patients that way. “Sorry about this.”

“Hey, it’s not your fault.” He grinned sweetly. Diana wondered whether he was still drunk, and wondered, also, how old he was—twenty-five? Twenty-six? She could sneak a look at his intake form …

Stop this
, she told herself,
stop this right now
. But she couldn’t stop looking at him—the pink in his cheeks, the way his chest lifted and fell as he spoke, the way he smelled like cut grass and malt and hops and, underneath it, something sweeter, something irresistible. She saw Doug Vance—really saw him, in a way she hadn’t seen, hadn’t permitted herself to see another man since the day she’d said
I do
.

Forget it, she thought. Tell him goodbye, close the door, wash your hands, go back to Eddie and his gonorrhea.

So she did … but, three hours later, after a morning of dispensing penicillin and Tylenol and bad news, she stepped into the waiting room and found Doug Vance again. His crutches were propped against the wall, and his bandaged foot was on top of a coffee table next to a stack of pamphlets on “The Facts of Lice.”

“Nothing’s broken,” he said, smiling and hopping up onto his good foot. “Good diagnosis. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

She didn’t answer right away. Maybe he didn’t know that she was married. She never wore her rings when she was on duty. They were just one more thing to worry about keeping clean.

“You can protect me,” he said, already hopping toward the door. “In case the Mummers come back.”

She followed him. “You think they might?”

“They are a vengeful lot, the Mummers. I can tell.” Even on crutches, he held the door open for her, and she felt herself responding as she passed him, almost close enough for her hair to brush his cheek.

I should say something
, she thought, as she sat across from him and sipped her latte. She’d work in some reference to “my son” or “my husband,” she’d casually drop her recent thirtieth birthday into the conversation. Except that never happened. They chatted easily, talking about med school and restaurants and running routes, about whether she liked her work. (Diana explained, putting as positive a spin on it as she could, that she didn’t have the kind of patience for seeing patients regularly and dealing with a lifetime’s accretion of illnesses and complaints, that she much preferred treating acute cases, then sending them on their way.) Somehow, an hour had sped by, and Doug was asking, “Do you ever go out and listen to music?”

“Sure,” she lied.

“There’s this band playing tonight at the Khyber. Screaming Ophelia?” By the way he said the name she could tell that this band was some kind of big deal, so she nodded, even though she’d never heard the name and had only the vaguest idea of where to find the Khyber, a club that even she knew was infamous for its cheap beer and its bouncers’ willingness to admit the bearers of some of the world’s least-competently faked IDs. Needless to say, she’d never been. It wasn’t the place where married mothers in their thirties hung out.

He grinned, exposing an adorable chipped front tooth. “You should come.”

“Maybe,” she said. Her mouth was dry. Lizzie could take care of Milo—or, if Lizzie had plans, Gary could do it. He’d sigh, and complain, but he could, for once in his life, read Milo his Lemony Snicket, make sure that he’d brushed his teeth, and lay out clean clothes for the morning … and she could go to a bar with this intriguing new guy.

She’d thought she’d forget about the show, and about Doug, as soon as she was home again, but he stayed on her mind. Once the dinner table was cleared, she’d said to Gary, “I need to go back to the hospital for a few hours.” He grumbled, the way she’d known he would—Lizzie had her meeting, which meant that Gary would be responsible for Milo—but Diana had ignored him, hurrying through the dishes while he sat in the recliner, reading
Sports Illustrated
while Milo read to himself.

In the bedroom, she’d slipped on her tightest jeans and a lacy white blouse she’d bought on sale, thinking it was romantic, with its square-cut neckline and long, billowy sleeves. She’d never had a chance to wear it, never had a place where it would be appropriate. With Milo downstairs, negotiating for fifteen more minutes of reading time, Diana pulled on her raincoat, then knelt in the coat closet and dug out her old cowgirl boots, the ones she’d had since high school, that had spent the last fifteen years crammed into a shoebox in the back of a series of closets. While Gary made a noisy show of putting Milo to bed (“Just you and me tonight, little buddy!” he said, a veneer of mock cheer in his voice that barely managed to disguise his irritation), she’d shoved her makeup bag into her purse. “Back by midnight!” she called and hurried out the door.

Nothing’s going to happen
, she told herself as she ducked into a Starbucks, locked herself in the bathroom, and pulled out her makeup bag. She’d stroked perfume behind her ears and between her breasts, then brushed bronze shadow onto her lids and painted her lips a glossy red.
I’m not doing anything wrong, I’m just going to hear some music. I’m having a night out
.

She made it to the club just after nine-thirty. Gary, she knew, would probably be sacked out on the couch watching
Law & Order
reruns, and Milo, please, God, would be asleep in his bed, lying on his back with his sheets pulled to his chin and dreaming innocent dreams.

“Ten bucks,” said the guy on a barstool by the door. She handed it over and slipped into the dark, narrow room.

Screaming Ophelia was midway through a cover of Better than Ezra’s “Good.” She leaned against the wall, listening, and finally Doug found her, and hopped over briskly on his crutches. “Hey!” he shouted, leaning so close that she could feel his breath tickle her ear. “You want a beer?”

She’d nodded. Once he’d headed off, Diana slunk into the corner, her back pressed against the wall by the crowd (so many screaming girls! Who knew Philadelphia was so full of them!). The band, she thought, was just okay, making up in volume what they lacked in skill. But Doug was another story. She watched him hop over to the bar, in jeans and a short-sleeved T-shirt that rose when he lifted his arms, revealing a tantalizing inch of flesh between its hem and his waistband. His arms flexed and bulged as he worked the crutches. Diana couldn’t stop staring as the band swung into a cover of a Richard Thompson song. “Oh, mascara tears, bitter and black / Spent bullet drilled a hole in my back / Salt for the memory, black for the years / Black is forever, mascara tears.” Diana closed her eyes, telling herself that she wasn’t doing anything wrong, and that it still wasn’t too late to leave.

When she opened her eyes, Doug was standing in front of her, two plastic cups of beer in his hand.

“You actually came,” he said.

“
Grey’s Anatomy
was a rerun,” she said.

He grinned, looking her up and down in a manner she would have normally found insulting. She licked her lips and tossed her hair over her shoulders, a Lizzie move if ever there was one. “I like your shirt,” he said. Diana felt her entire body flush.
I like your shirt
. Had more erotic words ever been spoken?

He handed her one of the beers. “Okay?” he yelled. Onstage, another band was doing unspeakable things to “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” crimes that poor dead Kurt Cobain did not deserve.
With the lights out, it’s less dangerous
. Indeed. Did Doug remember Nirvana, or had that been before his time?

Instead of thanking him for the refreshments and the entertainment, dashing back to the street, grabbing a cab, and going home, Diana took the cup and lifted her mouth toward the irresistible pink curve of his cheek. She breathed in deep, thinking that his scent—nutmeg, pine needles, lit matches—was as sweet a rush as crack or crystal meth was supposed to be. Not that she knew. Maybe her sister could tell her. “Thanks,” she shouted.

His eyes moved over her again. “You look good.” His mouth was hovering in the vicinity of her neck—a practical matter, she thought, just a question of making sure she heard him—but she felt his voice moving inside of her, rippling through her skin and muscles, illuminating every inch of her like a careening ball lit up the surface of a pinball machine.
Oh, I can’t stand this
, she thought.
I can’t
.

Then Doug leaned into her, one arm on either side of her head, and just like that, his lips were on hers, hot and demanding, and she was kissing him back, pressing one hand on the soft bristle of hair at the nape of his neck, fitting herself against him as her knees went weak, thinking that it had never been like this, never with Gary, maybe not even with Hal.

“Ooh,” she breathed as he pressed her against the wall and pressed himself against her, and God, she could feel every inch of him, every delicious muscular inch of him, solid shoulders, the muscles underneath the skin of his chest and his belly …

She made herself turn her head and take a breath. What was she doing? He was a med student, she was a doctor, a university employee. She was married, she was a mother, and besides all of that she was in a room full of people, any one of whom could see her and tell. Tell someone. Gary, or the dean, or the hospital’s chief, mean-mouthed Hank Stavers, who was visibly uncomfortable with the lady docs on staff and would probably delight in the chance to make trouble for her. “No,” she gasped. “Doug. I can’t … I’m …”
Married
, she’d started to say when he covered her lips with his own.

They kissed and kissed. She couldn’t get enough of it, his lips, hot against hers, his tongue slipping deliciously in and out of her mouth, his hands cupping her ass, holding her against him, squeezing her so hard she gave a squeak of pain and pleasure. He lifted his head and looked at her, breathing hard, eyes slitted.

“Outside,” he said, in a tone more command than request. Diana felt his voice stirring inside of her, in her belly, between her legs, tugging her like a leash. He turned on his crutches, and she followed him through the crowd, out into the darkness, down the street and into a parking garage and the entirely inadequate backseat of what she later learned was his mother’s Honda Civic, on loan to Doug for the semester. There, with Diana on her back, her boots pressed against the window and her wedding ring on her hand, they consummated their love, or whatever it was. Diana sobbed as her orgasm burst through her, kicking at the windowpane so hard she thought her boot heel would crack it. She was thinking of the ocean, imagining salt water closing over her head, icy gulps filling her nose, her mouth, her eyes, her lungs, and she welcomed the water even as it cut off her breath, because at least, finally, she was feeling something.

SYLVIE

On Monday morning at just after nine o’clock, Sylvie stood on the podium in her Spanx and her best suit (blue, not teal) for six excruciating minutes, looking out at the sea of reporters as her husband mouthed his act of contrition. The press conference was in the Grand Hyatt’s Regency Room, an utterly bland, perfectly nonspecific space that could have been anywhere, or nowhere at all. It was almost biblical, she thought, half listening to the words that rolled across the teleprompter screen at the foot of the stage, then, magically, out of her husband’s mouth as he stood at a lectern beside the American flag. He had sinned. He was arrogant. He was full of pride. “I foolishly convinced myself that the rules didn’t apply.” Sylvie shifted her weight, thinking that he was always better when he had her as an editor.

The speech went on. Richard admitted to hurting his family. He had betrayed his wife’s trust. Here, Richard turned to Sylvie with a look of grief on his face that struck her as stagy and rehearsed. She stared at him coolly until he turned back to the script, and reminded herself that it could be worse. Poor Dina McGreevey, wife of the governor of New Jersey, had had to stand on a podium much like this one, listening to her husband admit not only that he’d cheated on her with a staffer, but also that he was—surprise!—a “gay American.”

“I know I do not deserve the forgiveness of the ones I have wronged, or the indulgence of the people of the great state of New York,” Richard intoned. “But my mistakes were personal, not political.” Sylvie swallowed a sigh. At six that morning, Larry had brought her an egg sandwich, kissed her cheek, and wished her good luck. She’d caught a cab uptown and was back in the apartment by seven, which left her enough time to shower and change and pack everything she’d planned on taking.

When she couldn’t stall any longer she walked down the hallway and knocked on the door of Richard’s office. He was sitting behind his desk, in his good suit, one knee bouncing up and down. A pinprick of shaving cream clung to his jaw, and she found herself automatically reaching for a tissue before making herself stop.
Maybe his girlfriend can wipe it off
, she thought.

“Sylvie,” he said.

“I need the car keys.”

He nodded, as if this was what he expected. “I’ll have Joe get them for you.” He paused. She was about to leave when he said, “I could never tell you how sorry I am.”

She considered this. “Probably not.”

“It was stupid,” he said.

That she didn’t bother answering.

“It was just …” He raised his hands in the air. “It was just that she was …”

There? Sylvie wondered. Pretty? Hot? Available? But no. It was none of that. The woman had been helpful, in the way Sylvie herself had once been, helpful to the detriment of her own dreams, and she didn’t want to hear about the details. “Not interested,” she said. She’d slept soundly the night before, with the help of the green-and-yellow capsules that Ceil gave her, but now, suddenly, she was exhausted, wanting nothing more than to curl up on her bed—formerly their bed—and close her eyes and let this day pass without her participation.

“It was stupid,” he said again. “She was …” His voice trailed off. Sylvie looked at him hard with the glare that was usually reserved for Lizzie when she knew that Lizzie was lying.

“She was what?”

He stilled his bobbing knee, lifted his shoulders, and raised his hands. “Tell you the truth, Syl, she reminded me of you.”

“Except twenty years younger,” Sylvie said archly. “If you really wanted to distinguish yourself, you should have taken up with a sixty-year-old.” Richard managed a smile, and Sylvie felt her own mouth rising in response. It was so easy, seductively easy, to slip into her old, familiar banter with him. She’d known him so long, all the rhythms of his speech, all the things that would make him smile. “Or you could have just been faithful,” she said, her voice flinty. “That was always an option.”

He reached for her hand. She stepped backward so that he couldn’t touch her, but he leaned in, grabbing her hand, pulling her close. “I want you to forgive me,” he murmured. “I don’t want this to be the end of us. We’re a family, Sylvie.”

She thought about that—about Diana, her brilliant but humorless eldest, and Lizzie, her dreamy, wandering lost girl. “We’re a photo op,” she said.
We are props who exist for your pleasure
, she thought … and she had let it happen. She had let her family, her daughters, become those things.

“That’s not true.”

She looked at him, letting her silence be its own reply. The numbness had lifted, and she could feel it now, the pain and the shame she’d probably be feeling every day until she died. Richard’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, and at that moment she could see him as he’d been, a student sprawled on his back on the ice, a drunk boy on a neatly made bed, telling her he wanted to be president.

She forced herself to look away as he said, “I know I don’t deserve to even ask, but can you ever forgive me?”

“I don’t know,” she said. After a minute, he dropped his eyes, letting go of her hand. A minute after that, Joe Eido came marching down the hallway to tell them it was time. At no point over the weekend, or during the morning, or during the car ride to the hotel, with Derek sitting stoically behind the wheel, had it occurred to her to ask what it was, exactly, that her husband planned on saying.
Personal, not political?
The hubris, she thought. The pride of it! Did he expect congratulations, high-fives and way-to-gos because, in spite of all the speculation, he hadn’t misappropriated money to pay the girl and she turned out to be qualified for the job he’d helped her find? Was this a triumph because he hadn’t raped anyone, because he hadn’t given some foolish answer about hiking, because no money had changed hands and there wasn’t a sex tape and nobody had died?

“I have considered resignation,” he continued. The flashes were firing, so many of them, so bright and so fast that Sylvie couldn’t see anything but light. She squinted until the lights turned into a blur.
I’m going to be single again
, she’d told Ceil the night before, and Ceil had said,
You know, the problem with that is the maintenance. A man who’s never seen you naked before …
Her voice had trailed off, but Sylvie took her meaning. There, on the stage, she started doing Kegel exercises, squeezing her pelvic floor as tightly as she could for a count of five, then slowly releasing. Probably it was locking the barn door after the horse had gotten out, or, more specifically, after the horse had had two kids, but it couldn’t hurt.

The noise from the crowd rose as the reporters, three dozen of them, shifted in their seats and the cameramen jostled for their close-ups, a concussive murmur that threatened to drown out Richard’s voice. He leaned close to the microphone to compensate. “But resigning would be the easy way out. While I have hurt those who loved me, I have committed no financial improprieties, broken no laws. And I will stay the course. I believe that I can still effectively represent the interests of the people of this state in the Senate, and I will continue to do so.”

Richard bowed his head. “I made a terrible mistake. I betrayed my daughters. I betrayed …” His voice choked up.
He practiced that
, thought Sylvie. “The woman who knows me best, who’s known me and loved me for thirty-two years. But I did not”—and here, he looked up, shoulders squared, jaw set, tall and solid in his expensive blue suit—“and I will not, betray the people I serve, the people of the great state of New York.”

When Richard stopped talking she stood beside him, her left shoulder brushing his right one, while the flashbulbs fired. She had no idea how she looked, what expression she wore. The numbness was back, in full force, leaving her so frozen that she could no longer feel her face. Reporters shouted questions. Richard turned away. “That’s all,” he said, and reached for her hand. She let him take it, but as soon as they were through the bunting that separated the stage from the drafty corridor behind it she jerked it back.

“Excuse me,” she said to Joe Eido, who stood at Richard’s side with a watchful look, his pale eyes narrowed, as if Sylvie had turned into a strange dog, one that might bite. Her bag was where she’d left it, tucked under a table loaded with bagels and coffee urns. In the ladies’ room, she pulled leggings and a loose sweater out of her bag, shucked off her suit, her hose, her Spanx and underwire bra, and shoved all of it into the capacious purse she’d brought along for the very reason that it could hold a change of clothes.

She slipped on her comfortable outfit and pulled the car keys out of the zippered pocket of her purse. When she opened the door the hallway was empty. Someone had wheeled the bagels and coffee away. That was too bad. She’d picked at her meals all weekend long, even as Ceil had tempted her with creamed chicken and biscuits, cinnamon rolls and chocolate layer cake, and had, once again, offered to give Sylvie cooking lessons. In the early days of her marriage, Sylvie had cooked. She’d made the simple foods that Richard had liked—casseroles with ground beef and Campbell’s cream soups as their main ingredients; battered chicken dipped in breadcrumbs, a decent meatloaf. But then they’d moved to Manhattan, where you could get a dozen different kinds of takeout delivered to your door in minutes … and when your husband came home late and one of your daughters subsisted on buttered boiled noodles and peanut-butter sandwiches and the other had gone vegetarian at ten, delivery became the only sensible option. By the time the girls left home, Richard was spending the workweek in Washington while Sylvie took care of things in New York City, and saw him on the weekends. She ate most of her lunches out, with Ceil or at fund-raisers for the women’s shelter or the library, and the easiest thing to do at night after a day spent in the car or in meetings or with Richard was to order in soup or pick up a salad. Her mother cooked only on holidays, so there was no long-standing tradition of home cooking. Sylvie had come to think of her lack of skills in the kitchen as something she was powerless to change.

Over the weekend, Ceil had coaxed her with poetically written cookbooks, with glossy photographs of boar prosciutto, oily olives on rustic pottery, and glistening, crisp-skinned roast duck with figs—pornography, Sylvie thought, for women of a certain age. Not that she’d been tempted. She would taste, she told Ceil. She would set the table and pour the wine, she would wash every pot and pan her friend used making beef tenderloin with a red-wine reduction and fresh-baked popovers and a salad of baby spinach greens slicked with walnut oil, but, she told Ceil, she just wasn’t interested in learning something new. Still, she wished she’d tucked a muffin in her bag, or even one of Larry’s horrible protein bars that tasted like strips of chocolate-flavored rubber, because now she was starving, and there was nothing left to eat.

Joe and Richard stood a ways down the hall in front of a television set tuned to one of the cable news free-for-alls. Sylvie hadn’t intended to watch, but a flash of blue caught her eye. Her blue suit. She paused as the familiar, expected strains of “Stand By Your Man” filled the air, and she saw herself on that stage, live from fifteen minutes ago, looking busty and beaky and fat and old, hands folded awkwardly at her waist, the tweed fabric of her skirt straining over her hips, those extra inches, that bit of flab she’d devoted the past decade of her life to trying to eradicate, when she should have been … what? Servicing her husband, according to the leathery, turtlenecked crone currently being interviewed.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” the woman said, in response to a question Sylvie had missed. “Wives, submit to your husbands as the church submits to God. That’s the Bible, and the Bible doesn’t lie. If Sylvie Woodruff had been taking care of business on the home front …” The woman gave the camera a broad, knowing smirk.

“Now, Jane,” the avuncular host began. His name was Greg Saunders. Sylvie knew him; she and Richard had had him to dinner at the Georgetown apartment. “Are we talking just traditional intercourse here, or what?”

Sylvie forced herself to breathe deeply, to try to forget the image of herself, wrinkled and dewlapped and old, in her too-tight suit, standing by a man who’d shamed her and broken her heart, standing there as if he hadn’t dishonored her, as if she still loved him, to try to forget that there were people, probably lots of them, who thought this was her fault.

She stared at Richard’s back. He and Joe, standing beside him like a leashed capuchin, would watch the shows, they’d monitor the online chatter. Later, they would commission a poll, accurate to plus or minus 5 percent, starting with the magic words:
If the election were held tomorrow …

I’m done with this
, she thought. Then she said it out loud. “Done with it.” Richard turned, his face softening as he saw her. He held out his hand, as if she’d take it, as if all the bad times were behind them now.

“Sylvie?”

She ignored him. Head held high, shoulders back, she walked right past his outstretched hand, his familiar face, without saying a word.