Live a Little (34 page)

Oh, the injustice.

“The thing is, Ren, I didn’t go around bragging about it. In fact, I’ve pretty much sat on it all these years. Done my duty. Been the veritable
soul
of discretion. But when Laurie and I were hanging from that bridge and things were looking a little dire, and Laurie asked me point-blank if it happened—no, what she did is
beg
me to tell her the truth—I couldn’t lie.”

Couldn’t I have?

Nausea siphons through my gut.

“Ren, could you excuse me for one moment?”

He nods. I trot briskly to the hall bathroom, fling back the toilet lid, and heave for a few seconds. Nothing comes out. Typical.

I gargle with water anyway to wash away the bitterness of the Scotch, and I try to regroup.
This is not about you, Quel. This is about Ren and Laurie and whatever demons they need

to exorcise before they begin the endless trail of sleepless nights and savage love/fear that is child-rearing. So step up to the fucking plate, okay?

I return to the kitchen. Ren stands where I left him, his eyes as stagnant as my pool.

“So what do you want me to do?” I ask him.

“I don’t
know.
This is not good. We’re about to adopt. We took out a second mortgage on the house. Your sister’s on the warpath.
This is not good
.”

Poor Ren, who thinks everything is supposed to sort itself out with a golden eyebrow raise, cannot handle the deviation from life plan that has occurred.

“Look, I’m sorry. I really am. But maybe you should have told her yourself, instead of letting her wonder all these years, which, if you really want to know, is actually crueler than— ”

“We did not sleep together!”

In spite of my brother-in-law’s state of ire, his face is not the mottled red or purple you would expect from such an outburst. Rather, he has paled to a creamy ivory, an inoffensive hue that Martha Stewart might choose to paint her bathroom. Before I can lecture him again on our appalling state of nudity twenty-three years ago—which I am almost sure I can provide proof of in the form of birthmark recognition—I hear a van pull up outside. Ren, apparently lost in the unique world of regret that can come only from having dated two sisters in the wrong order, seems untroubled by the possibility of intrusion.

I dart over to the window in time to see the UPS man jog up the steps to the Bonafacios’ house. Carla opens the door and, instead of signing for the package, smiles and motions him inside. I file away this observation in a mental cabinet marked
HOT DELIVERY MEN AND THE DUMPY REGIONAL BANK MANAGERS WHO SCREW THEM
.

Relief.

I turn back to Ren. “What is going on with you and Laurie, exactly?”

“I don’t
know.
She’s gone ballistic. She called me at work today, told my assistant it was an emergency, got me out of surgery to ask me if I think she’s
pretty.
Married sixteen years, and she wants to know if I think she’s attractive, if her . . . damm it, if her
hips
are wider than they used to be. This is not the woman I married. This is not Laurie. I’m worried about her, Quel. And I’ll tell you something else: The woman’s in no state to adopt a child.”

There is no other way to describe it: I am floored. The idea that
Living with Lauren!
and I could share the emotions of blind jealousy and diffidence is astounding. Contrary to my usual ungenerous nature when it comes to this sort of thing, I do not feel glad or humbled by my role in Laurie’s descent into insecurity. For one, it is too weird. For another, I suspect that, like Ren’s nascent love for me, it will not last the season.

“God, Ren. I’m sorry.” Empathetic sister-in-law.

“I’m under a lot of pressure right now. My partner’s leaving the practice, moving, setting up in Las Vegas. We took out a second mortgage against the house to expand the practice. We already signed the lease on the building. But Rick’s wife has to go to Vegas. Because the desert air is good for her chakras or something. Goddamn hippies.” Ren dabs at his brow, which is as beautiful and dignified as the rest of him, even when damp.

“Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it.” Delusional sister-in-law.

“I don’t know. Look, I’m sorry I got a little hot there. It’s not your fault. All you did was speak your mind, just like you always have.” Ren smiles, the same golden-boy grin that first transfixed me in rhetoric class, and looks me straight in the

eye. “Did we really sleep together?” he says.

“Not really. It was more like a doctor-patient thing.”

Ren takes a deep swallow of the Scotch I coopted and leans his golden-haired elbows on the table. “It’s not like I don’t think about it sometimes,” he says.

At once the world, with its kaleidoscope of colors, clamors, and pungencies, grinds to a halt, rotating backward blindly like a carousel gone berserk. Beneath my fingertips, the polished oak of my kitchen table explodes into sensual tendrils of sea grass, transformed by rapture . . .

I am twenty years old, Ren is twenty-one, and we are rolling on an empty beach, the planet tilting wildly around us. I can almost taste the mulchy tang of seaweed in the air . . .

“Probably more than I should,” Ren adds.

The magic words flow over and through me, a river of clear blue relief after a blistering two decades. For years I have operated under the assumption that I was, to Ren, a blip. A trivial bump in the road toward romance that snaked its way into my sister’s embrace. The inequity of our feelings for each other, the protracted state of my pain, always seemed to be lodged in my throat like a wad of undercooked steak. I don’t know why it never occurred to me that Ren might feel the same. That he, too, might wake up some nights, his heart pounding a terrified cacophony of remorse into the blackness. That he might sometimes feel his universe shift toward hopefulness at the mere sight of me, the mundane shards of our lives refracting banal certainties around him, a vortex of ill fit.

I close my eyes. My mind takes over.

We tumble into each other’s arms. We fit, if not like a glove, like a pair of well-worn bicycle shorts—flattering still, and clingy in the right spots. Truly, it is a marvel. Nothing has changed. His cut-grass smell, the gently crinkled skin at his temples, the hard dance of bone and sinew beneath my hands—they send a sweet rush of rightness through me, like they always have. He raises my hand to his lips and kisses my wrist. Slowly. Achingly.

The car door echoes outside again. UPS guy, having finished delivering his package to Carla.

My eyes snap open. Ren is looking at me with—can it be?—longing.

And I feel . . . icky.

Icky?

“I have laundry to do,” I blurt. A glutinous brown spot mars my leggings; I’ve been Choxied.

Ren jumps up awkwardly, flopping a little, like, well, an old guy. “Of course.”

There is no “of course” when it comes to me and laundry (of course). Ren flees to the safety of the kitchen counter, keys jangling. Once again we have skipped ahead of the ritual, embarked on the breakup without the preceding payoff. Who knew the end of rapture could be so simple?

“Right,” I say. That sensation pulsing in my chest—can it possibly be pity?

“Thanks for the drink. And the ear,” he says.

“Anytime.” I check the clock; I can still catch the tail end of
Maury.

“Well, bye.”

After a reasonable thirty seconds spent wallowing in that particular lagoon called immense relief, I get up and start separating whites from colors.

After all, if I’m going to celebrate the end of the affair that never was, I may as well do it in clean clothes.

CHAPTER 25

Call of the Booty

Phil rubs a window into the frost on the windshield and blasts the defogger. “So . . . what are you doing tonight?”

I wrap my woolly robe tighter. I have on Taylor’s imitation UGGs and a fleece cap, but warmth is a pipe dream when you’re outside at five
A.M.
, mere minutes away from your downy bed. The Accord’s engine, normally melodious, rumbles impossibly loudly. The neighbors’ windows are dark, as are the kids’. What will I do if the lights come on, leap into the shrubbery?

“Nothing,” I say, too drowsy to lie. “Same routine?”

“Call me when they’ve gone to bed.”

I lean over and peck Phil on the lips, a facsimile of a wife kissing her beloved husband off to work. He looks at me hard and hot—Interested Wolf—and pulls away down our street, until all that’s left of our liaison is a stream of carbon-monoxide vapor.

Feeling a little too close to Carla Bonafacio for comfort, I scurry back into the house and down the hall to our room, relieved to discover that the bed is still warm.

I suppose it is obvious, what’s happened. Yes, Phil and I are sleeping together. I know, you want me to say “again,” but that would sort of discount the many moons we spent ravishing each other on alternate leap years.

I’m not sure how it all came about. There was that night ten days ago, after we “helped” Taylor. And the day Ren came over, when I called Phil and demanded to know what the hell he was doing, leaving a Frederick’s of Hollywood number lying in the fruit bowl. And expecting me to wear it. And expecting me to wear it for
him.
There’s a name for what happened later, when I was awakened at 1:32
A.M.
by the tinny drumroll of pebbles against my window.

Booty call.

“Yes?” I called out the window, rather primly (I’d like to think).

“Sorry I’m late.” Phil withdrew one sneakered foot from the tangle of impatiens. “I fell asleep during the fourth quarter.”

“Oh. Gee, that’s too bad.”

“Door has the chain on. Can you . . . you know?”

“What?”

Phil winced as he collided with a rosebush. “Let me in, goddammit.”

The chain slid off without a hitch. One thing led to another and—presto!—I had myself a part-time sandbag. Again.

For some reason—unspoken yet fully endorsed by both of us— we do not want the kids to know about this development. Still trying to lead by example in this great game called life, I suppose. The situation requires no small amount of ingenuity. Generally, I call Phil from my cell phone after the lights have gone out in Micah’s, Taylor’s, and Sue’s rooms. A stealthy hallway check, a brief glance at the thin strip of shadow under the door, a quick shower if I haven’t already had one—and I’m back to my room, speed-dialing. Phil drives over from Extended Stay America and parks a block away. Under the cover of darkness, my estranged husband pushes open the strategically unlatched side gate farthest from the kids’ bedrooms and sneaks through the yard, entering the house through the master-bedroom sliding doors. The first night the dogs backed Phil into the tool shed— until they figured out who he was and their baying dissolved into joyful slobbering—so now I lock them in the laundry room after all Casa Rosa inhabitants fall asleep, ignoring the accusation in the two sets of doleful basset eyes.

I finally confide in Sue about the affair over lunch at the Ramp. “I can’t believe how much more effort he puts into the sex now that we’re separated.”

“Heh,” Sue says.

“It’s like now that he has to jump a fence and wear black slacks and a camouflage jacket to get some nookie, he thinks he’s some kind of Casanova. He thinks he’s George Clooney. I can tell. I caught him reading my
GQ.
And putting gel on his hair.” I dip the corner of one of the restaurant’s signature burgers into a side of ranch dressing.

Sue nods. “You’re the other woman now. Men always want what they can’t have. And what other men want. They are such lemmings. If I ever meet one who has an original thought, I’ll sell the restaurant and join him at the ashram in a heartbeat.”

This misapprehension explains a lot about why Sue’s relationships always end like criminals on cop shows, panting their way to their futile, undignified, often drugged end.

“Why are we so much more desirable when they’re not married to us?” I slip off my clogs and massage my unpedicured heels against the table leg.

“Because kids and mortgages and bills and seeing you in your Nair mustache aren’t turn-ons,” Sue says. “Reality is not a turn-on. Fantasy is. As long as you’re not doing the daily grind together, you maintain some sense of mystery for them. Stupid bastards.”

Duke Dunne’s face pops into my mind. If he is a lemming, he is a baby one, not yet fully developed in his lemming habits. Why he is attracted to me, I can’t really figure. Maybe in his world, my type of boring is exotic. Once, after one of my high-school-senior-year Will No Man Breach the Fortress of My Chastity crying jags, Ma told me that everybody has a person out there who sees her—the homely person—as an exotic bird; all the idiosyncrasies that make her unique are like plumage. Maybe Duke Dunne doesn’t care about my terminal insecurity, my stretch marks, and my extremely long-lived case of sibling rivalry. Maybe he thinks they’re cute, like robin’s feathers.

“So, I read Tay’s diary,” Sue says.

“What?”

She pops a fry in her mouth. “I know it’s shitty. But . . . What are you looking at me like that for? I did it for you, ingrate.”