I'm Glad About You (35 page)

It was the strength of that conviction which enabled him to make it through the rest of the afternoon, until the blessed exhaustion of both baby and toddler claimed the day. In fact, his ability to perform his life while living it somewhere else inside his head was so refined by this time that his mother would say, as she kissed him good-bye, “This is the nicest day I think we’ve ever had, Kyle. You have the nicest family I could wish for.”

“Thanks, Mom,” he said. She smiled at him with all the benign glory of her aging motherhood.
What a fucking idiot
, the bad side of his brain sneered, gleeful. Kyle was shocked at the malevolence of the thought, but what did it matter? She would never know. Thoughts like that came and went with lightning speed, and no one ever knew.

Both girls were asleep by the time they pulled into the driveway, which Van had predicted, so they were both already in their jammies. She carried the baby into the lovely house as Kyle lifted Maggie out of her car seat.

“Mommy do it,” the sleepy child muttered, still and always her mother’s girl.

“Tell her I’ll be in to sing her a song,” Van called back to them. “I’ll be right there, honey.”

Folding the sleeping children into their adorable bedrooms took seconds. But Van had all the time in the world. She sang a lullaby while tucking the baby into her crib. She made sure the bars were settled properly and the bumper wasn’t all bunched up. She went up to Maggie’s room to make sure she was really asleep, and not faking, and if she was in fact awake (she wasn’t) to see if she needed a cup of water or a story. She went back to the baby’s room again, to do who knows what. Exiled as always from this relentless ritual, Kyle sat alone on the edge of their bed, in their bedroom, and waited for her.

He had taken the precaution of turning the light off. For the past months Van had developed a very active schedule in her evenings. The dinner dishes took longer and longer to rinse and put into the dishwasher. On the nights when the girls went down easily, she had developed a fondness for late-night reading. Kyle didn’t mind the threadbare flimsiness of these tactics; he knew that she was avoiding their bedroom until she thought he was asleep. He sat silently in the dark and waited for her to grow weary of whatever the phony diversion was this time, and come to bed.

The whisper of that white dress. She appeared in the dark, floating through the room like a ghost.

Kyle turned on the light.

“Oh, for crying out loud.” Van put one hand on her stomach and the other on the edge of the bed. His bad brain allowed itself a shiver of delight, that he had frightened her. The other half of his brain managed to maintain a clinical distance while Van collected herself. She turned her back on him and headed for the closet. “I thought you had gone to bed.”

“I was waiting for you.”

“In the
dark
?” she asked, exasperated at the idea of this insanity.

“Yes, in the dark,” he replied.

“Well, that doesn’t make any sense.”

“I don’t need it to make sense.”

“Honestly, Kyle, is there a point to this? Because I am really tired.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?” The breath of a defensive uncertainty was taking hold under her impatience. It had been so long, years even, since he had called her out on any of her bullshit, and she was smart enough to recognize that something different was coming her way now. “Because I was out
side
all day, taking care of two children, in case you hadn’t noticed. As usual.” This last bit was muttered under her breath, a hostile last-minute tag.

But these games were done now. The whole thing was done. “That’s why you’re tired? Are you sure? Are you sure it’s not because you’re
pregnant
?”

It was spoken with too much anger. The bad part of his brain was winning. A look of panic flew across her face, but so quickly. She smiled at him, just as quickly defiant.

“Keep your voice down,” she commanded him. “I won’t have you waking the girls.”

“You won’t have me
what
?” he asked. “You have betrayed our entire family, and you are telling me, what are you telling me, not to
yell
?”

“Betrayed, that’s a joke.”

“No, it is NOT.” He managed to land this without breaching the walls of the bedroom, but she was having none of it.

“I’m not talking about this here. I mean it. We should go downstairs, to the kitchen, where—”

“I am not going
downstairs
and neither are you.” He shut the door and positioned himself in front of it to make this point. “You are not ordering me around like a child, and you are not making me the problem here.”

“Lower your voice.”

“Whose
baby
are you having, Van? Because we both know it’s not mine.”

“I don’t have to answer that.” She tipped her chin at him defiantly and “drew herself up,” that’s what they used to call it, this phony moment when the person who is the most in the wrong pretends to be taller than she actually is. He watched her mind settle into some far-off place where its righteousness was unassailable. It was astonishing.

“You don’t have to answer that? You don’t answer, to your husband—”

“You were
never
my husband.”

He had expected some narcissistic retelling of their history,
you haven’t been a husband to me since the baby was born
, something that completely erased the fact that she was the one who had kicked him out of the marriage bed. But “never”?

“I have no idea what that is supposed to mean,” he informed her. “That is just fucking crackers.”

“Please refrain from the use of obscenity, it’s highly offensive.”
Here we go
, he thought,
here we go.

“Okay, Van. Great. I won’t say anything. You go right ahead. Explain this situation to me. You are pregnant, yes? You’re showing, so I would like to warn you, as a physician, that a denial at this point won’t do you any good. Because eventually a baby is going to show up. And that’s going to be a challenging thing to explain, if you’re not even pregnant.”

“Babies are not things.”

“No, they’re not; they most certainly are not,” he admitted. “So may we expect a new human
being
to show up around here, in the next six or seven months? And if that human being does show up, do you want to care to hazard a guess as to why that might happen?”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“‘Cuckold’ is actually the word, but yes, it is widely understood that it makes a man ridiculous, when he is
cuckolded.
” God he sounded like an ass. How was he losing this argument? He had all the facts on his side, and all that was right and good, and the girls too,
his
girls, all on
his
side, he had everything on his side, but she had folded her arms now and was looking at him like he was nothing more than a cheap bully. She was a skilled and devious opponent in an argument; over the years she had taught him the bitter rules of engagement with a will that refused to lose anything at any cost.
Okay then.
He leaned against the closed door and folded his arms.
If you want to do this all night, we will
, he thought. He couldn’t tell anymore who was in charge inside his head: bad brain, indifferent brain, victim brain. Was there a good brain anywhere?
No. There isn’t.

“I am pregnant. Yes,” Van said, defiant.
Why was she defiant?
thought one part of his brain.
Because she’s a fucking idiot
, another answered. “It is not your child.”
No shit
. “I think it’s clear that we haven’t been getting along for a long time.”
Again, no shit.
“I met someone. You don’t need to know who, it doesn’t matter. But he and I, we fell in love, and I’m sorry if this news hurts you, but honestly, it’s been so obvious for so long that our marriage was simply a huge mistake from the start. And I want you to always have a good relationship with your daughters, that is important to me. Maybe more important to me than it is to you, frankly, you don’t seem all that interested in them, most of the time. But that is an unkind thing to say and I really, I never meant to be unkind or unfair in any way. So.”

A pause.

“
So?
” In spite of the fact that most of his brain was feeling colossally aggrieved, the last shred of his logical mind couldn’t help but want her to finish her fucking sentence. So
what
? The lack of apology was maddening. Not the lack of apology, but the crazy conviction that this complete disaster was somehow his fault. And his failure to fall to his knees and beg
her
for forgiveness was even more reason for her to heap blame on his unworthy head. His many years feeding at the malign teat of gender sensitivity rose in his chest like bile. Those everlasting feminists needed to take a lesson from Van. All that moaning about injustice and patriarchy and victimhood? She could teach them a thing or two about how to avoid
that
bullshit.

“
So
I don’t see the need to belabor this,” Van sighed, full of disappointed regret. “I would not have broken up our family in this way,” she informed him. It was a phenomenal performance. “I didn’t choose this.”

“Well,
I
certainly didn’t choose it!”

“That’s my point, Kyle, neither one of us chose this.”

“And yet only one of us
cheated.
”

“Is that right?”

“Yes, Van. I am not the one who went out and decided to have a
child
with another person.”

“You would if you could.”

“What? What, what on earth—”

“Don’t act all, don’t—”

“What are you accusing me of?”

“You
know
what I’m accusing you of, and I don’t think, frankly, I
don’t
think you should make me say it.”

“Make you say what?”

“You know.” The accusation was profound.

This was all going so wrong.
Well, because she’s insane. Is this a surprise, that she’s insane? She’s not insane. Then what is insanity/ what is it/ she’s right you’ve been unfaithful/ never/ she knows/ I should go to bed have to get up at four Lord Jesus Christ.

“Dennis told me.”

The strangeness of this was perhaps the only thing that reached him. The room was so dark, so still. The one light on the bedside table beside him, beside the closed door, really made no impression at all, on the darkness. If she hadn’t been wearing that absurd white dress, she would have been invisible, a black hole, nothing.

“Dennis told you, told you what?”

“Now who’s lying?”

“I don’t know, Van. I guess you think I’m lying but the fact is I don’t know what you’re talking about, what did
Dennis
tell you?”

“You are still in love with her! When you married me, you were still in love with her, and that wasn’t fair, Kyle. Not to me, not to the girls, to bring them into a loveless home was not fair to any of us.” She was so aggrieved he thought his head would explode. The only thing to do, the only thing he could even think of doing, was to stick so excruciatingly to the facts that the hope of reality might hover around this nightmare of a confrontation.

“I assume you are referring to Alison Moore.”

“Yes, you
assume
correctly.” The sarcasm was dripping with timeless indignation.

“I have not seen or spoken to Alison in a year. It’s more than that now, I haven’t seen or spoken to her since that stupid dinner party, so I don’t know what Dennis told you—”

“He told me the truth. That you had sex with her, up in his father’s
bedroom
, you had sex with her while I was pregnant—”

“What—”

“That you are still obsessed with her, that you go over to his place, you lie to me and go over to his
apartment
and watch her, you make him tape the shows and then you watch her having sex—”

“That is completely ridiculous. It’s beyond ridiculous. I have been completely faithful to you,
I am not the one who cheated.
” That shut her up. He decided to stick with a winning strategy and just repeat it. “I am not the one who cheated, Van. I never cheated on you. You are carrying someone else’s baby. You cannot make this my fault.”

“You never loved me. Our marriage was never a real marriage.”

“Well, that’s interesting, because it certainly feels like a real marriage.” There was another silence at this. He didn’t know if that meant he was winning or losing. He didn’t know which would be better. “So Dennis told you all this shit—”

“The truth, you mean?”

“Whatever. Why were you off gossiping about me with Dennis?”

“It wasn’t gossiping—”

“Is he the one, he’s the one you slept with?”

“Oh, please. That’s disgusting.”

“
That’s
disgusting? None of the rest of this—”

“You are so distorting this situation.”

“How would that be possible, Van, seriously, I don’t see how I could possibly distort this any further.”

“I did not sleep with Dennis. He’s your friend. I would never do that.”

“But you would have another man’s baby.”

“I knew you would say that.”

“Say
what
?”

“All your Catholic righteousness, it flies right out the window when it’s convenient. Well, let me tell you something. I am not getting an abortion. I would never do that. I would never,
never
do that.”

“Did I ask you to?”

“Didn’t you? What is my choice? If you don’t want me to have another man’s baby, what does that mean? That I should kill it? Isn’t that what you’re saying?”

“I’m not, I’m just—trying to get to the bottom of this!”

“That’s not what you’re trying to do.”

“What am I trying to do then?”

“If you had come to our marriage with a pure heart, none of this would have happened. If you had tried to love me. But you never did, it is so apparent to everyone, and our marriage never even
existed
and I want a divorce
and
an annulment.”