Love and Other Natural Disasters

Holly Shumas - Love and Other Natural
Disaster

Eve is eight months pregnant and
in the middle of a Thanksgiving celebration when she discovers that her husband
Jonathan has developed an intimate relationship with a woman over the past
year. Jonathon asserts his innocence (an affair involves physical intimacy, and
he didn't have any), while Eve feels deeply betrayed by the emotional
connection he shared with someone else. What Jon has done seems so terrifyingly
out of character that Eve finds herself questioning her entire reality. Did she
ever really know Jon at all? Was their happiness together a lie? Is emotional
intimacy more forgivable than sexual intimacy? And can their marriage survive?

CHAPTER ONE

Some years, I gaze around the
Thanksgiving table and I feel almost painfully grateful for my own bounty, for
the abundance that is my life, for everything that brought me to this moment,
with these people, inside this light.

And some years, I just eat turkey.

This Thanksgiving had been off to a
promising start. Jacob was at his most adorable, regaling us all with what, at
five years old, was a new tale of Pilgrims and Indians and friendship. My
husband, Jonathon, was the consummate host, topping off my friend Tamara's and
her boyfriend Clayton's wineglasses from the decanter, expertly cuing Jacob
whenever he was about to struggle for a word or detail. Jonathon's mother was
getting along with mine, meaning Sylvia wasn't openly disapproving of my
mother. (Nothing feeds gratitude like lowered expectations.) And I thought,
looking down at my swollen belly, about the party crasher inside—boy or girl,
we didn't know yet. Jonathon and I wanted the surprise.

My happiness was magnified by this
being our first Thanksgiving in our own home. I'd never had a dining room before,
let alone a house, having grown up in small apartments in Southern California
with my mother and brother, and then living in San Francisco, land of low
square footage. Who knew I could get this much pleasure out of a dining room?
Who knew I could be so happy living in the suburbs?

When Jonathon and I first had
Jacob, we pledged to be urban to the end; we were going to raise street-smart
kids who'd osmotically pick up four languages by the time they were ten. We
resisted suburbia for as long as we could, mourned the friends who had fallen,
and sworn we'd never go to the dark side (meaning, shopping centers perennially
anchored by Starbucks and Bed Bath & Beyond). We told each other that we
loved the authenticity of our city block—i.e., the smells of sulfurous cooking
and urine, the reek of real life—as we seemed to be in the only San Francisco
neighborhood undergoing a degentrification. But my bubble of self-delusion
burst the day I'd circled twenty minutes to find a parking space, and as we
walked along, Jacob asked a homeless man where
his
mommy was and the guy
let out a string of invectives that followed us half a block. Since Jon and I
couldn't afford a house in any decent city neighborhood, the burbs it was.

The phone rang, and Jonathon said
he'd get it, he was already up. From the dining room, I could see into the
kitchen, and I didn't expect Jon to reach out and shut the swinging door
between the rooms. But it wasn't until he'd been gone awhile, maybe as long as
fifteen minutes, that it truly registered as anything out of the ordinary. It
wasn't like Jon to disappear when there were people to attend to. What was
going on? Could there have been an accident? Or—and fear gripped me most as
this thought hit—what if something was wrong with Jon? A doctor calling with
test results? A doctor wouldn't call on a holiday unless it was really
bad—impending-coronary bad. That was how Jon's father had died, just keeled
over at the age of fifty-two. Of course, he'd been married to Sylvia, and that
could weaken any man's heart.

When I was pregnant, I was prone to
panicked worst-case scenarios. In the later part of my pregnancy with Jacob,
and for much of the first year of his life, I turned into one of those people
who couldn't watch the news. Jonathon and I developed a little ritual around it
where I'd ask him for highlight reels. He'd tell me a bunch of true things and
one that was made up and I'd have to guess the falsehood. He started really
getting into it, reading different Web sites that specialized in true and wacky
news items from around the world. It was surprisingly hard to guess the faux
item. For example, there really were two blond twin girls who called themselves
Prussian Blue singing perky songs about white supremacy, the Olsen twins of the
White Nationalist Movement. Jon and I both loved the ritual, which served to
divert me from some truly awful things that were occurring in the world, things
utterly beyond my control, and reminded me of the fun and silliness and
connection that we shared. It made me feel safe.

But right then, I was picturing Jon
collapsed on the ceramic kitchen tiles, gasping for air. (Did people gasp when
they were having coronaries?) I excused myself and pushed open the swinging
door, relieved to see he wasn't lying prone, but surprised that he wasn't in
the kitchen at all. Maybe it's just hindsight, maybe it's too much TV—the
"Did I put the dog in the washing machine, or was that on
The Brady
Bunch?"
syndrome—but the rest of the house seemed eerily still in that
moment and my stomach was
pretzeled
as I walked down
the hall toward our bedroom. I don't think this next part is hindsight, I think
it's memory: Though nothing in our marriage to that point indicated that I
should, I was moving deliberately, stealthily, like I imagined a hunter would
stalk big game. I could hear Jon's muffled voice behind the closed bedroom
door. I don't know what made me put my ear up to it, but when I did, I heard
Jonathon speaking to someone with great tenderness, saying things like, "
Shhh
, you're going to be okay. This day will be over soon.
And you'll be just fine."

My heartbeat accelerated; I had to
remind myself to breathe. There were two options, as I saw it: continue
eavesdropping, or open the door. Walking away was an impossibility. If I
listened longer, he could say something like, "I love my wife more than
anything in the world, and I have to get back to her." Or perhaps,
"Henry..." Any man's name would be acceptable. Of course, there were
those androgynous names like "Sam." Unless... ?

I pushed the door open, and
Jonathon looked up, his eyes widening. We held the gaze a few seconds, and then
he said into the phone, "Hold on." To me, "I'm sorry this is
taking so long. I'll be out in a minute."

Like it was an ordinary call. Could
it be an ordinary call? I wanted to think that it was. But somehow, I didn't.
That alone seemed damning, but of whom? Of him? Of me? "Who is that?"
I asked.

"It's just a friend," he
said. Nothing strange in his tone, but that wording. Does anyone say "just
a friend" if someone really is just a friend? Wouldn't you say the
friend's name?

But this was Jonathon. He only had
just friends. "Which friend?" I tried to make my tone match his, but
failed.

He put his hand up to indicate it
would be one more minute, and addressed the receiver again. "I need to go
now, okay?"

Whoever was on the other end
actually kept talking. I could make out a female voice, though I couldn't hear
what she was saying. She prattled on at breakneck speed as I stood there
waiting. I wasn't just waiting for her to stop talking; I was waiting for him
to interrupt her. Who was this woman with the audacity to call my husband away
in the middle of Thanksgiving, who hears my voice in the room, who hears him
say he needs to go, and keeps talking?

But, I countered, maybe that was
what made her harmless. Maybe she had the audacity because she didn't need to
fear discovery, she didn't need to fear the wife. She was just a friend who was
too upset on Thanksgiving to observe social graces.

I couldn't take it anymore. If he
wouldn't interrupt, I would. "We have guests."

Jonathon mouthed the words
"I'm sorry" in an exaggerated way, like we were sharing the joke of
how some people can't take a hint. "I've really got to go now," he
told her. "Take care of yourself, okay?" He clicked the disconnect
button on the cordless phone. Then he turned to me and smiled. "Let's get
back in there."

I couldn't stop hearing:
"
Shhh
, you're going to be okay."
It was the
intimacy of that
"
shhh
";
not how you
shhh
the loud guy behind you at the movie
theater, but the way you quiet a distraught lover.

"Which friend did you say that
was?" I asked.

"You don't know her. She's
someone I know through work. She has a hard time at the holidays. She must have
been going through her address book, seeing who'd answer the phone." Was
his forehead shiny?

"That's weird, isn't it?"

He shrugged. "I guess she is.
I don't know her very well."

I was staring at him, wanting him
to say something, do something, anything that would loosen the grip of this
terrible anxiety, to expunge all traces of that "
shhh
"
from my memory—some science fiction that would turn back the clock. But that
was the problem; it seemed like fiction. "What's her name? Have I ever
heard about her?"

He shook his head. "She
doesn't work in the San Francisco office. She works out of Chicago."

Okay, that brought some scant
relief. Three more factoids like that and maybe... "How do you know
her?"

"I met her at a conference.
You know, that corporate 'Up with People' thing I had to go to last
September." He walked toward me. "Aren't you the one who said we have
guests?" he teased.

I froze. This was Jon, the man I'd
loved for ten years, the father of my child, my children. My hand moved to my
belly. Would he really cheat on me, when I would be having his baby in just
over a month? Would he really cheat on me, ever? That was the first time I'd
actually allowed myself to think the word: "cheat." Jon wasn't a
cheater. Jon was a straight arrow, almost to a fault. He mailed back those
premade address labels from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation if he wasn't giving
a donation. This was the kind of thing I had chosen to find endearing rather
than irritating, the kind of quirk I had chosen to love when I had chosen to
love Jon for the rest of my life. Love was a choice that I made every day,
quietly. Now that choice was mine again, only it was both thunderous and
Technicolor. Would I choose to love Jon? Would I choose to ignore this
screaming instinct inside me and believe him?

I nodded, and to Jon, that meant we
would get back to the party as he'd suggested. In a thick, dreamlike state, I
drifted back to the table with the battle between gut instinct and volitional
love continuing to rage inside me. I reseated myself next to Jonathon and
sipped my sparkling water and tried to rejoin the conversation like the good
host, the loving wife.

Wine. I would have killed for some
wine. One glass couldn't hurt this close to delivery; I'd been abstinent for
the entire pregnancy, not a single slipup. It wasn't like I was going to marinate
my baby in the stuff. It would just be one glass. Maybe my baby could use a
little alcohol right about now. Maybe some wine would be good for her heart. Or
good for his stress level. I stifled a giggle of hysteria rather than amusement
as I pictured our baby swimming around blissfully in a solution of two parts
amniotic fluid to one part merlot. I could always explain it later if she (or
maybe he) ever found out: "Mommy needed that one glass, sweetie pie. You
see, she'd gone a little crazy thinking that Daddy might be cheating, but it
turned out Daddy would never, ever do something like that to Mommy, to us.
Because that would be really, really fucked up. Not just fucked up, even. We're
talking colossally vile, we're talking duplicitous and loathsome. I mean, we're
talking
fucked up
here. We're talking about a life that's nothing but a
lie. We're talking..."

My hand was nearly shaking as I
reached for the decanter, earning me a glare from Sylvia. It was a look that
said, "I always knew you were a good-for-nothing baby poisoner who doesn't
deserve my son." Which, come to think of it, wasn't actually that
different from how she normally looked at me. What I didn't need right then was
a confrontation with Sylvia; I wouldn't be responsible for what came out of my
mouth. I pretended I was reaching for the sweet potatoes instead, a maneuver
that certainly didn't fool sharp-eyed Sylvia.

I tried to concentrate on the
lighthearted chatter around me. Clayton (who'd gone to film school with hopes
of being the next great auteur, only to find himself a freelance infomercial
director five years later) was describing a series of YouTube videos featuring
Jacob. The idea was that Jacob was a troubled child star who kept failing
rehab.

"So Jake's got his sunglasses
on, and he's running to the car, and Tamara's his publicist, trying to hold
back the paparazzi, and finally he turns to the camera, all mournful-like, puts
out a hand and says, 'No press.' Show them, bud," he instructed Jacob.

To the laughter of the table, Jacob
instantly adopted a world-weary expression and recited, "No press."