Love and Other Natural Disasters (4 page)

Maybe this was just the sign of an
early midlife crisis. He was trying to pump himself up, see himself through
Laney's eyes. I could almost understand that. (I was having his baby. That was
a pretty big incentive toward understanding.) What I could understand, I could
forgive.

But then I read an e-mail from
about two months ago:

L,

I can't wait to see you either!
Fortunately, there were still tickets left for the Giants game on Saturday. You
and me, kid.

That's when the tenor of the
e-mails changed. The next two weeks' worth were feverish with exclamation
points. You could practically read the hard-on. Then, after they must have seen
each other, he wrote this:

L,

I feel horrible about what
happened. Can you forgive me?

Love,

Oh, God. There it finally was. I
went on to the next e-mail of his, but scrolled down to read what she'd written
first.

J,

You're married, you have a baby on
the way. I shouldn't have pushed like I did. I thought I could handle things
and I guess I couldn't. I'm in love with you, but you already knew that. I've
never been this humiliated, but I know it's my own fault. The only thing is,
you love me, too.

L,

You're right about some things. I
do feel love for you, and I am attracted to you. You're a phenomenal woman. If
I'm honest with myself, I sensed that right from the first night, and when the
bar was closing down, I should have gone back to my own room. That would have
been the safest thing. But I didn't, and that was one of the best nights I've
ever spent with a woman. The way we talked, and the way we laughed... I hadn't
felt like that in I don't know how long. I was buzzing just being near you.

I can still laugh just thinking
about us nominating the worst songs of all time, you explaining why "Take
A Letter, Maria" is worse than that
pina
colada
song (you said, "He's blowing off his wife for her, but she still has to
take dictation," and I said, "How hard is it really to find someone
who likes...
pina
coladas and sex on a BEACH?")
and then we were both singing and laughing until we could barely breathe. It
was perfect, there's no other word for it.

But tempted as I was, I didn't want
to have an affair, not then and not now. I want to be married. I want to raise
my kids with their mother. I can't give that up. Last week, when you said it
would be enough for us just to spend a night together, I didn't believe you.
And even if it was enough for you, it wouldn't be okay with me. I can't live
that kind of a double life.

I've looked forward to you, to
telling you things, having you tell me things. I looked forward to seeing you
more than I let myself realize. Somehow you became the easiest part of my life.
But that changed when I had to lie to Eve's face so we could go to the baseball
game, and then afterward, in the car, when I had to tell you no, the way I had
to say it twice, once while prying your hand off my jeans.

Things are different now, and the
reason I went all the way back to the beginning, to those feelings I couldn't
admit to myself, is because I want you to know how fantastic you are. I want
you to find love with someone who'll see that and love you back and marry you
and give you a family. He's not me. J

P.S. I've rewritten this e-mail
five times. I've never had to do that before with you, do rewrites. It's always
been so effortless. Can it go back there? The answer's probably no, but I have
to ask the question.

That brought the count to four.
Four times he'd mentioned my name. I
had to lie to Eve's face.
How many
times had he done it today? Every time he'd said Laney was just a friend. When
he talked to her, I had no name; when he talked to me, she had no name.

But that wasn't the most chilling
part. No, the worst was that he didn't say he wanted to be with me, he didn't
call me the woman he loved; no, he wanted to be married. He wanted to be with
the mother of his children. I just happened to be that woman. He never said he
was in love with Laney, only that he "felt love" for her, but it
wasn't at all clear that if the playing field was level, he'd choose me over
her.

I didn't want to—Lord knows I
didn't want to—but I resumed reading. I had to know the next chapter.

I could tell he and Laney weren't
the same after the visit. Occasionally they skipped a day in their
correspondence, and some of the lightness was gone. I got the impression that she
sometimes cried to him on the phone. She was afraid she'd always be alone, that
she'd never love someone else the way she loved him, and that no one would love
her the way she believed he could, if he'd only let himself. He never told her
he loved her again, at least not in print.

I caught up to the present. There
were no more secrets, at least none that could be discovered this way. Turning
off the computer, I didn't know if I'd ever been so exhausted. But my mind
wouldn't stop. I was fighting to reconcile the type of man who would redact his
own wife for another woman with the notion of my husband, the father of my
children. Most terrifying was that he could carry on like that for over a year
and act entirely normal with me. He should have felt guilty every time he
looked at me, every time he looked at Jacob. He was betraying our family.

If I hadn't overheard him tonight,
how long would he have continued behind my back? And how far would it have
gone? He'd resisted Laney once, but he hadn't ended their relationship. At the
word "relationship," I felt a bout of nausea. It worsened as I
thought of Jacob and the baby inside me. I'd always believed I was giving them
the best man I knew for a father.

I was back in our bed, and nowhere
close to understanding, when the phone rang. It could only be him.

"Hello," I said, my heart
at a canter.

"Eve, let me come over.
Please. Can I come over?" Jon said in a rush.

"No."

"Please. I'm right by the
house."

"That's not the point. How
close you are isn't the point."

"You're right, okay? I've been
an asshole. Worse than an asshole. I don't want to be away from you, from our
life together. I'm sorry. Can I come and tell you in person how sorry I
am?"

He'd put me in a position where I
couldn't believe him anymore. I felt the tears starting. "No, you can't
come here."

"Please, Eve. Please." He
sounded like he was about to cry, too.

"I can't believe you right
now. Should we talk when I can't believe anything you say?"

"Yes."

"I can't even look at
you."

"Yes, you can. Please, Eve.
For Jacob. For our baby."

"Don't bring her into
this!" I nearly shouted, and as I said it, I knew it was true. We were
having a girl.

He was silent. I was silent. Then
he said softly, "You know it's a girl, too. I just realized it a little
while ago."

At that, I wept too hard to talk. I
buried my face in the pillow and let the phone drop beside my head. He didn't
speak for a few minutes; then I heard my name over and over. I lifted the phone
to my ear.

"Please let me come
over," he said.

How could we recover from this? Six
weeks ago, he'd spent the day with Laney, he'd signed off to her with
"Love." He was a liar and a cheat and possibly in love with another
woman, and possibly not in love with me and...

I exhaled, and surprised myself.
"Okay."

CHAPTER FOUR

Me
wasn't kidding about being right by the house. Five minutes
after we'd hung up, he was knocking on the front door. It wasn't enough time to
develop a decent game plan, so I was operating on one principle only:
Don't
tell him what you know. Don't tell him you read the e-mails.

I felt shame at violating his
privacy, which felt like my own violation of our marriage vows, but perhaps
most shameful, I knew that if I showed my hand, I'd never be able to check up
on him again. He'd change his password, knowing I was the kind of person he had
to guard against. I hated that we'd arrived here, that neither of us deserved
to be trusted anymore.

I looked at myself in the
full-length mirror affixed to the bedroom door. Wavy auburn hair (my natural
shade, no hair dye during pregnancy) with a halo of frizz to frame my face,
blotchy skin, wearing the rhino-sized flannel pajamas that were my greatest
comfort outside of chocolate. And, normally, Jon.

It had been a long time since I'd
really considered my appearance and what Jon might think of it. The truth was,
I didn't look that much worse right then than I
looked
normally. I lived in those pajamas. I put them on us early in the day as I
could get away with, sometimes cooking dinner in them. My skin was often broken
out during pregnancy, and I couldn't easily recall my last haircut. But I
wasn't supposed to spend my life worrying whether my husband found me
attractive. I wasn't supposed to have to worry whether there was a Laney somewhere,
pretty and thin and woe-is-me-
ing
her way through the
holidays. In Jon's mind, maybe I was one of those hearty women who can squat
down in the field and have their babies and then get back to plowing, and Laney
was off being a damsel in distress with a perfect manicure and a blowout.

He was knocking again, insistently.
He probably thought I'd changed my mind about letting him in. If that's what he
was thinking, he wasn't entirely wrong.

I quickly tied my hair back in a
ponytail, walked to the front door, and opened it. Jon and I looked at each
other with wariness, his tinged with sadness, mine with... damned if I knew.
There was no word for this maelstrom.

"Can I come in?" he asked
with a note of hesitation.

I stepped to the side by way of
answer.

"Do you want to talk in
here?" he said, indicating the living room.

I shrugged and settled myself on
the couch. He sat on the opposite end, his feet flat on the floor, leaning
forward. He was getting ready for a pitch. It couldn't have been clearer if
he'd had a PowerPoint.

"I know you're angry," he
said. "I mean, obviously you're angry."

"I don't know what I am,"
I said.

"I should have told you about
Laney a long time ago."

"Why didn't you?"

"I didn't tell you about
meeting her at the conference because it wasn't a big deal" — (Lie Number I)
— "and I didn't think we'd ever talk again. Then she e-mailed me, and I
e-mailed her back, and it still wasn't a big deal. Then we were e-mailing more
often, and she wanted to talk on the phone, and at some point, I decided not to
mention it to you because I hadn't mentioned it sooner."

"So you decided to start
officially lying to me."

"It didn't seem like a lie.
The thing is, in my mind she was completely separate from you. She didn't
really have to do with you. I'm not saying that was the right way to see it, it's
just the way I saw it."

"And now how do you see
it?" I said.

"I see that I shouldn't have
been writing to her and talking to her so much, that it's disrespectful to you
and to our marriage. I understand that now and I won't do it anymore." It
sounded canned, rehearsed.

"You had feelings for her. You
must still have them. I mean, you were talking to her this afternoon." If
he said he had no feelings, that was another lie, maybe a lie that indicated
just how strong his feelings actually were; if he said he did, then I had to
listen to my husband talk about another woman. Double-edged swords as far as
the eye could see.

"She was my friend. I would
never do anything physical with her. This wasn't an affair, Eve."

"It's an emotional
affair." I closed my eyes in disgust.

"I can't believe I just said
that. You've turned me into an episode of
Oprah."

"I'd go on
Oprah
with
you, let the audience stone me if that's what it took."

"You went outside our marriage
for a year. You were giving Laney things and getting things from her, and it
makes me sick."

"I understand how this looks,
and how bad you feel, and I feel terrible about that. I'm not saying I can make
it up to you overnight. I can sleep in the guest room until you're ready."

"My mother's in the guest
room." "I'll stay at the hotel until Barbara leaves, and then I'll
stay in the guest room for as long as you want. I know I have to earn your
trust back."

"I can't stand this! I can't
stand how we've learned to play these parts. It's like you know just what to
say because every man before you has said the same things. We've seen it all on
TV and this is how it's done. Next you're going to say we can go to marriage
counseling." He looked away. "Am I right? Was that your next move if
I didn't go for the 'guest room/building trust' thing?"

"I'd do counseling, if you
wanted," he said carefully. "But I'm not playing a part here. I love
you. I'm not saying that because it's in the script." He was gaining
intensity as he spoke. "I'm saying it because I have never in my life
loved someone like I love you. I have never wanted to marry anyone but you. I
have never wanted to have a life with anyone but you. That's the truth,
Eve."

I wanted to be moved; I wanted his
speech to turn me around. But if what he'd said was true, and he could feel all
that for me and still write those things to Laney, what did any of it really
mean?

"You've only e-mailed and
talked on the phone? You haven't seen her since the conference?" I asked,
willing him to tell the truth.

He didn't answer right away. Then,
hesitantly, he said, "A couple months ago, she was in San Francisco."

The correct answer was six weeks.
But at least he was close. "She came out to see you?"

"She'd always wanted to see
San Francisco...," he trailed off. "Yeah, she came to see me."

"And what happened?"

"Nothing. We went to a
baseball game. That's all."

"You're saying she flew out
here so you could go to a baseball game, and nothing else?"

"Maybe she had a crush on me.
But like I said, nothing happened."

"Were you tempted?"