Love and Other Natural Disasters (11 page)

"No! I want to see
Daddy!"

"I bet Aunt Tamara and Uncle
Clayton would watch a movie with you. I bet they haven't seen—"

He started crying, that furious
full-body crying that always makes you embarrassed for parents at the
supermarket, the kind that makes you think,
They should give that little boy
less sugar,
or
Why don't they discipline him?
Despite my best
efforts, the past weeks had been hard on Jacob, and it was heartbreaking to see
him turning into that boy.

"I'm not going! I hate
them!" he said through his tears.

"Jacob, I know you're upset,
but that's not nice. And it's not true. You love Aunt Tamara and Uncle
Clayton." I moved toward him and kneeled so we could be eye to eye. He
wouldn't look at me.

"You can't take Daddy
away," he said.

"You'll see him soon.
Tomorrow." But my voice lacked conviction. I was wavering.

While I knew a parent should never
give in to a child having a tantrum, I found myself considering it. Every
morning and every night, Jacob looked at that calendar on his wall, as if
something might have changed during his hours away or asleep, as if he might
suddenly find that there were no more "Jacob and Daddy" days. The
truth was, Jonathon and I could talk tomorrow night just as easily. I was being
selfish, desperately wanting a "Jonathon and Eve Talk About Whether He's
Made Enough Progress to Come Home Night." And I wanted it ASAP. I'd
deluded myself into thinking that Jacob would take the rescheduling in stride.
Everyone would have you believe motherhood is the end of selfishness and I
tried—I really did try—and for the most part, I succeeded, but maybe just this
once, could I have this? I didn't want to wait another day to find out what was
going to happen to me, and to this family I loved.

Jacob seemed to read my
uncertainty, and his crying let up. Like a hunter sensing the vulnerability of
his prey, he said again, loudly, "I will see my daddy tonight!"

I'd been swaying, but that tone put
me back on solid ground. If I taught Jacob that all he had to do was plant his
feet and outlast me, things would only get worse. "You're not seeing Daddy
tonight. You're seeing him tomorrow night. Now it's time for you to eat
breakfast so you won't be late for school."

"No-o-o-o," he wailed, jumping
up and down. "No breakfast! No school!
Nooooo
!"

"Jacob—"

"No!"

"Come in the kitchen—"

"No Aunt! No Uncle! Daddy!
Daddy! Daddy!" He shouted it over and over in a frenzy, and I couldn't
take it. I put my head down and shut my eyes. I needed this moment to end. I
needed this day to end. I needed this life — this post-Laney life—to end. And
finally, mercifully, he quieted down. I felt his hand on the top of my head.
"Mommy?" he said tremulously.

Looking up at his face, I didn't
see any trace of anger anymore, just fear. I held out my arms.

I didn't think time could move any
slower than it had for the past several weeks. But it could. Time moved so
slowly that day that there ought to have been another word for it. Something
with more syllables.

Finally, late that afternoon, I
dropped Jacob off at Tamara and Clayton's with a backpack laden with his
favorite DVDs. All signs of his earlier resistance were gone, and he was happy
to see Tamara when she opened the door. She gave me a hug, whispered in my ear,
"Go get '
em
, tiger," and then I was off.

I tried to put myself in a mind-set
to forgive Jon. I told myself over and over,
He didn't have sex with her.
She was right there in front of him and he resisted.
That had to mean
something. Everyone except Lil thought it did. But I kept getting stuck on the
image of Jon and Laney in the car together, with him struggling mightily
against himself. He might not have touched her sexually, but he must have at
least entertained the possibility. Not to mention, he could very well be in
love with her.

If only I could have stopped at
that first thought:
he didn't have sex with her.
Or, better yet,
he's
really in love with me.
But every thought led inexorably to the next, down
this rabbit hole of betrayal, and in my mind, it never ended well, much as I
tried to force it. Finally I just tried to think as little as possible, staying
busy right up until Jon knocked at the door.

As we stood at the threshold, I
felt curiously shy and expectant, and I saw that in Jon's face, too.

"Hi," he said. His voice
had a faint crack in it, like when you haven't used it in a while and aren't
sure what will come out.

"Hi," I said, sounding
soft and girlish. It surprised me. "Come in," I added, now more like
myself.

"Okay." He laughed.
"You want to step back then, sister?"

I laughed, too, realizing I'd been
barring his entrance. I moved aside sheepishly, and he came forward.

"Couch?" he asked.

"Couch," I affirmed.

We settled ourselves, both laughing
slightly at the shared absurdity of being so nervous around the person you knew
better than anyone.
Thought
you knew better than anyone. My laughter
dried up immediately.

"So, hi," he said,
smiling.

"Hi," I said, not fully
returning the smile.

He realized it was down to
business. "Well, then," he said. "I guess I'm supposed to give
you a progress report."

"I guess so."

"Have you been listening to my
messages?"

"Yes."

"That's good. I wondered
sometimes if you were just deleting them."

"I wouldn't do that."

He looked at me with affection.
"No, you wouldn't."

I had to look away. His gaze was
too intimate. It pulled too hard.

"What do you think of the
messages?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"I guess I just want to know
where I stand before I start talking. I mean, if it's okay for me to ask
that."

I felt flustered. "I just—I
don't know how to answer."

"You don't seem as angry as
you did. Am I reading you right?"

"Sometimes I'm still angry,
but on the whole, I'm just upset. Confused. Disappointed. Scared about what's
going to happen to us."

"Well, we're feeling a lot of
the same things, then. That's a good thing, right?" His expression was
hopeful.

"Maybe."

"You wanted me to go to
therapy to figure out why I did what I did. And I think I have."

"So fast?" I couldn't
help but ask.

"I have a really good
therapist. You'd like her. She doesn't let me get away with anything."

"What are you trying to get
away with?"

"It was a figure of speech.
Maybe the wrong one, given what's happened between us." He hesitated.
"Can I touch you? Maybe hold your hand?"

Again, too intimate. "I don't
think I'm comfortable with that yet."

"That's okay. My therapist
said this is going to take time. She said that I'll probably have to reassure
you a lot, and accept that you might not be reassured for years. I might have
to keep answering the same questions, and living with your doubt, and with the
fact that you might not let yourself really trust me or love me completely for
a long, long time. I want you to know I'm prepared for that."

"This feels kind of like a
sales pitch."

"Does it? Sorry." He
leaned forward, then rocked back. I realized how much adrenaline had to be
coursing through him. This was it, the bottom of the ninth inning. He reached
into his bag and pulled out a book. "My therapist recommended this."
He held it up so I could see the cover. At the top, in foolishly ornate script,
was
The
Touchless
Affair,
and below was a
picture of a couple obviously in turmoil, the woman crumpled against one side
of a door, the man—imploring—on the other side. Along the bottom, How
to
Survive Emotional Infidelity.

"Have you finished
reading?" I noticed that his bookmark was only about halfway through.

"I didn't need to. The reason
my therapist wanted me to read this is because when I showed up at her office,
I didn't really understand what I'd done. I was minimizing it. She wanted me to
read the book so I could get that an emotional affair is as bad as a physical
one. I get that now." He opened to a page marked by a Post-it. "I got
it when I read this: Attending to someone outside of the marriage robs your
partner of the intimacy they deserve.'"

"You needed a book to tell you
that?" I wished I could believe his conversion, but it seemed a little too
convenient and showy, like something you'd find in a revival tent.

"I'm not proud of it, but
yeah, I guess I did." He turned to the next Post-it. '"Sex isn't the
essential ingredient in infidelity; secrecy is.'" He closed the book.
"I was hiding Laney from you. And that was really wrong of me. I'm
sorry."

Weeks of waiting for this, for my
husband's epiphany that he shouldn't lie to me for a year.

"You want to know why I was
with Laney. Not
with
Laney, just—"

"Yes, I want to know
why."

"The thing is, it doesn't
really make sense. I mean, I have this great wife and this great family, and
Laney—well, she's a nice woman, but that's all. Why would I jeopardize all I
have for her?" He paused. "It's got to be because I was scared.
Nothing else makes sense."

"Scared of what?"

"It turns out that
transitional events often kick off affairs because of all the anxiety they bring
up. So I must have been scared about becoming a father." He paused.
"Again."

"You were scared about
becoming a father," I repeated, "for the second time."

"I met Laney around the time
we were trying to conceive. Maybe I was thinking about how much my life would
change. Maybe I wanted to recover my lost youth."

"Maybe you were thinking that,
or you
were
thinking that?"

"I wasn't thinking it
consciously. Here, listen." He opened the book to the third Post-it note.
I was really starting to hate those fucking things. "I read this, and I
thought, 'We're a lot like Bill and Gina.' 'Bill, twenty-eight, and Gina,
twenty-nine, were a doctor and a housewife living in an upper-middle-class
home. Bill was used to their orderly life, and to getting a certain amount of
affection and attention from Gina. While pregnant, Gina shifted her focus from
Bill to the baby inside her. This was threatening to Bill, who found himself
more drawn to a
coworker
named Catherine." I was pretty sure the
emphasis on
coworker
was Jon's." 'At first, Bill started to confide
in Catherine more while he was at the office. Then, they began meeting for
drinks after work—'"

"So you're saying that you
were threatened by the idea of the new baby? Were you threatened when I was
pregnant with Jacob?"

"Maybe a little bit of
both," he said. He looked so earnest. What Jon was peddling, it seemed he
was also buying.

"So you felt neglected by me
when I was pregnant with Jacob?"

"A little."

"And when we were trying to
have another baby, you were worried that you'd lose even more of my
attention?" I couldn't keep the incredulous note out of my voice.

"That's part of it. You didn't
let me finish reading the vignette. Bill isn't just threatened about losing
attention, but anxious about the change in role from husband to father."

"What change in role? You're
already a father!"

"It's different to be a parent
to two kids than one. And to be a parent to
a
girl instead of a
boy—that's a whole different ball game."

"Jon," I said.

"What?"

"Give me that book."

He handed it over, and I paged
through, my disturbance rising. I saw that he'd highlighted sentences for the
most part, not even entire passages, and all of them seemed calculated to make
his case about a generally faithful, upstanding, loving husband who has one aberration
in his life. I flipped past his bookmark and began to scan. "What about
this chapter?" I demanded. "What about how affairs are often about a
lot of unacknowledged hostility toward your partner? How people who can't
express anger sometimes channel it by acting out? Maybe, for example, by doing
things like talking on the phone to their girlfriends on Thanksgiving with
their wives in the next room."

"I didn't read that
chapter."

"Oh, you didn't?"

"I didn't have to, because
that's not what it was about. It was about my new role."

"It wasn't a new role!" I
said heatedly. He was lying to me again. I'd asked him to take some time, to
dig deep, and he brought me a book and some self-serving pop psychology. He was
treating me like an idiot, just like he had for the whole past year.

"Look, I understand that it's
hard for you to trust me. I'm prepared to ride all that out—"