Parts Unknown (16 page)

But raise the wax paper and everything assumed distorted, blurry proportions. That pleasant-seeming tenured professor was a warden holding me prisoner in a life that wasn’t anything I wanted or understood. The little apartment forced me to spend insufferable amounts of time with my nearby mother-in-law, and I walked through my days like a zombie. I lived the life many would envy, but it wasn’t the life I wanted. I had thought I loved George yesterday, but today what I felt seemed a self-serving sham. I’d married him so I wouldn’t have to be Vivian any longer. I could be his pet, his conquest, anything so I wouldn’t have to keep trying, and looking, and wanting things I couldn’t have.

Lucy was the only thing I’d ever wanted that I’d gotten to keep. Even though she kept me trembling daily on the verge of exhaustion, I still loved her more than anything. No imaginary waxed paper goggles would change my love for her.

But twenty-four hours was all it took to distort how I felt about George into something unrecognizable. I couldn’t face him. He’d immediately see the awful truth—that I was still in love with Mr. Fantasy Man I’d known for a few weeks ten years ago, and all I wanted to do was make hot, passionate love with him and decorate his body with chocolate-based paints.

Fortunately, routine was so ingrained for us now that George didn’t even notice anything amiss. He came home in time for dinner, for once. Lucy was over the moon at having dinner with her daddy, and he kept his attention focused on her. And I’d ended up making an effort on the meal—I’d tossed the linguine with shrimp and lemon, an uncharacteristic departure from my usual “if it takes more than five minutes to prepare, it isn’t worth it” attitude. Mealtime was so hectic, George and I weren’t even able to speak, doing triage instead while shoveling food in our mouths as fast as possible. Lucy was pretty much draped head to foot in plastic—bib, chair cover, floor cover—in a futile attempt to stop food from migrating from her plate throughout the house. There was an incident with a spilled cup of milk, and a lot of crying about strawberries instead of grapes for dessert—“Mommy, strawberries was my favorite
last
week. So I’m not eating strawberries anymore. I don’t want them! Get them off my plate! I want grapes
now
!”

So, our only chance to talk didn’t happen until Lucy was asleep, after eight p.m. George took over the bulk of the bedtime routine—bath, story, hugs and kisses. I only had to make an appearance at the end, to give Lucy a last kiss. “Daddy, hold my hand till I fall asleep,” she murmured sleepily, and he did. He was such a good dad. He’d do anything for Lucy, as he would for me.

How could I even think about Josh when here was my my future, right in front of me? My difficult, beautiful Lucy, and my steady, unwavering husband.  “Tough day?” he asked sympathetically, emerging from Lucy’s room, exhausted himself after a full day of teaching, traffic, and three-year-old. He peered with concern at my drooping eyes, red-rimmed from constant internal viewing of the Vivian-and-Josh porno. “Not so bad,” I had to answer. And that was the extent of the evening’s conversation. I excused myself to bed, incredibly early, to continue my fantasizing in private. Imagining Josh, I couldn’t think about George. How could I not see Josh? And how could I see him, realizing I still loved him, and betray George so despicably and thoroughly?

~ ~ ~

I’d felt ill all the time since Sunday—my stomach aching and head pounding—but also intensely alert, deliriously happy for no reason. Since reading that Book Review section, a constant song was running through my head. It went, “Josh is back! Josh is back!” all the time, and in
I Love Lucy
style, I’d find myself whirling thrilled through the kitchen, singing at the top of my lungs as I cleaned the bathroom.

Eating seemed unnecessary. I was subsisting on handfuls of Rice Chex and chocolate chip cookies. I was on a huge high, Josh’s face in 3-D, all the time, in the front of my brain. I couldn’t sleep now that Josh was coming. And I couldn’t sleep, thinking about Josh constantly, when George was right there next to me. The only person who’d ever believed enough in me to give me everything—a nice middle-class life, a child, love, security. I was the worst. I was an awful, heartless person. How cruel to George, to even think about Josh, much less plan to see him.

Worst of all, George was beginning to annoy me. Little things, like swishing his mouthwash around for exactly sixty seconds. The way he spent a whole half hour every evening shining his shoes while talking to Madame on the phone. Okay, maybe these weren’t little things. Everything George did, besides paying all our expenses, was bugging me. But I couldn’t say a word.

Early Tuesday morning, I watched impatiently as George watered his orchids. He did so twice a week in the warmer months so that they’d dry out by nighttime. He puttered around, moving a few orchids so that they’d have better access to light, and snipped off faded blooms with his little red pruners, dropping them with a rustling sound into a leftover Trader Joe’s bag. Then he went to the kitchen to prepare Tuesday waffles. We’d gotten a Belgian waffle maker as a wedding gift, and George’s whole face lit up when he opened that present. “I’m going to use this all the time!” he exclaimed, and it wasn’t just hyperbole—he did, every Tuesday. Separated the eggs, whipped the egg whites, folded it all together, and made waffles. All at 6:30 in the morning. Lucy woke up, crying as usual, smelled the waffles cooking, stopped, and waddled into the kitchen, her nighttime diaper soaked—she was potty trained during the day, but not at night. “Waffles!” she squealed delightedly, as she did every week, always a glorious surprise. I didn’t care—I wasn’t hungry in the least. When would George
leave
already?

But no: first we had to go through the waffle ritual. George always had only one waffle, and he poured syrup ever so carefully on that waffle, tilting it so that every hole had a little syrup in it. When the amount of syrup was about equal, he cut up the waffle in eight square-ish pieces, and ate each slowly, all the while helping Lucy with her waffle, which she would rip to shreds, and then dunk each shred in as much syrup as possible before devouring it using her fingers, the waffle simply a syrup-transport vehicle. Lucy maxed out at one waffle as well, which left me to eat the other half-dozen. Tuesdays, I spent the day eating waffles: for snacks, for lunch, and sometimes, for dinner. If I never saw another Belgian waffle again I would be eternally thankful. But throwing away the waffles felt disloyal to George. Tuesday waffles were his expression of love. He made them to make us happy.

Finally, George showered, grabbed his briefcase, and drove off. I pulled out in the Volvo with Lucy. It was only a mile to the preschool from our apartment, straight down Curson, right on Pico, a few blocks west of Fairfax. Instead of walking Lucy to her classroom as I usually did, I dropped her off in the car line, giving her a hasty hug goodbye and barely making eye contact with Ms. Bridget, who shepherded her into the building. I noticed that one end of the Happy Hands Preschool sign had come unmoored; it flapped crazily in the breeze. I drove home so quickly I broke whatever neighborhood speed limits there were, sailing over the speed bumps on Curson so fast I probably wrecked the car’s undercarriage.

And at last, for the morning at least, universes needn’t collide. It was just me and the computer. Sleazy or not, I was ready to do some serious digging. This time, searching on “Joshua Barnes” yielded a cornucopia of hits. His book page on Amazon. Scholastic’s promotional page for his book.  And, bonanza, his personal web site. Unhesitating, I clicked straight to it. Clearly professionally done—a pastiche of superhero-ish colors—reds and golds—lots of Flash animation,
ka-pows
ricocheting off the screen at me. Clicking on About, I saw an attractive photograph, different from his book-flap photo—sweet, now I had two photos to commit to memory. In this one, he was relaxing in an adobe-walled studio, fingers poised over the keyboard of a Mac, gazing with a crooked smile at the camera. His hair was long now, curling almost to his shoulders, and his face looked boyish and satisfied.

I read with a sinking heart what I should have noticed on his book flap copy: “Joshua Barnes lives in Santa Fe with his wife and daughter.”

Well, there you go. It was one thing to spend several days fantasizing about getting back together with an old love; quite another to realize that my half-baked plans involved not only me, but also Josh, cheating on our respective spouses and children. I had no moral fiber, to even imagine such a scenario.

I clicked through links—blog postings. A bulletin board. None of them registered. Of course he’d be married. Of course he would have moved on.

I closed my browser window with a decisive click. That was that. I was so shook up, I badly wanted a drink, but it was 10 am. I still had some standards. So I rooted around my sweater drawer, another choice hiding spot, under thick green and beige sweaters until I came upon the crinkly little rectangle. My emergency stash of cigarettes. I rarely smoked anymore, but there were some times when sanity was more important than health. I went out the front door onto the narrow walkway outside the apartment and leaned forward cross-legged against the balustrade. I looked up at the chateau-like spires of the building’s roof. Castle, my ass. Holding on to the chipped white-painted metal railings with one hand while grasping the cigarette with another, I felt as if I were peering through the bars of some tenuous prison.

Mr. Abramoff came up the walkway, brushing fallen jacaranda petals from his jacket. He was a Hasidic Jew, and was usually attired in a black hat, black suit, and spotless white shirt. He was probably my age, but I persisted in calling him by his last name, because he seemed so much more wise and aware than I was. He appeared to have it all figured out. I envied him his complacency and the slow, deliberate way in which he spoke, with a kind of rocking, singsong cadence. I’d heard he was once a secular Jew, and had become born-again in whatever sense it takes to become a Hasid. Here was someone who had considered all the options, and decided on this one path. From there, all his decisions henceforth were made and prescribed. All he had to do was follow them, like a to-do list.

“Hi, Mr. Abramoff,” I waved, trying not to blow smoke in his direction.

“Hi, Mrs. Anglin,” he waved back amiably, his pudgy fingers backlit by the sun like starfish.

“Nice day, huh,” I offered. I always had a hard time figuring out what to say to him—our lives were so utterly dissimilar it was like chatting with someone who lived on the moon.

“Sure,” he replied, reaching into his shirt pocket, removing a packet of cigarettes, and touching it to his forehead and then toward me in a small salute of solidarity.

I grinned, surprised, and blew a ragged smoke ring his way.

~ ~ ~

I had drawn a series of cartoon-like panels at the end of that long-ago August—a visual history of our month together. I had folded the pages in half and put them in the outside pocket of my duffel; they’d eventually migrated to the bottom of a cardboard box in the garage, beneath strata of old birthday cards, yearbooks, and Hollywood Bowl programs. Looking at the smiling cartoon Vivian and Josh was too painful, like poking a fresh wound. I’d figured I’d take out that history one day, maybe when I was really old, in a retirement home or something, and all by myself. But that morning, after spending an hour staring dumbly into space on the walkway, inhaling my way through half a packet of cigarettes, my body fairly thrummed with nicotine.

Head aching, dizzy, buzzed, I hurried to our garage in back of the apartment building, yanked back the obstinate bolt, and battling rat droppings and spider webs, made it to the bottom of that buckled box. Clutching my prize, along with a battered box of doll heads and a crumpled paper bag containing three hacky sacks, I hurried back up the apartment, peering furtively around as if being spied on by the adultery police. Paging through those silly pictures, he came back to me full force, all those dusty long ago memories suddenly reclaimed. They reminded me that I’d been loved, unequivocally and completely. That I’d been young once, and free.

Maybe I was going a little batty. Just a little, maybe. Living on only a few hours of sleep a night, thinking constantly about Josh—someone I’d known only for less than a month, ten years ago.

Josh didn’t even remember me, probably. But I was giving up on “just friends.” Impossibly, that prehistoric part of the brain—the limbic system—never forgets love. Those passionate memories had been concealed for years, but Josh’s return made all those feelings dance right back, as if they’d never left. Even though I was in love with a ghost from my past.

No matter what, I was going to make Josh love me again. I didn’t know how, but somehow I’d show him that I was better than his wife, that he still needed me. I was already figuring out how Lucy and I would live in Santa Fe with him. How long we’d wait to get married. How to break the news to George. Maybe his wife would live down the street, so he could see his daughter as often as he wanted. Whatever. He would love me, again. He had to. I couldn’t be the only one feeling this desperate yearning; it wasn’t fair. If I hadn’t stopped loving him—he couldn’t stop loving me. That was that.

I wasn’t going nuts, really I wasn’t. This was the truth, as I could imagine it.

I fingered the doll heads in the old box curiously. I faintly recalled doing a series of disembodied doll head paintings in college. I took some toothpicks from the kitchen drawer and stuck them in the soft plastic at the bottom, propping the heads up on little toothpick tripods.

I wandered through the house, casually placing doll heads here and there—among the orchids in the living room, on Lucy’s nightstand, and lined haphazardly on top of our dresser.

There wasn’t much in the house that belonged to me. I’d brought a paper towel holder, my small collection of vintage cookbooks, and a couple oil paintings with me when I’d moved in with George. He had everything I’d need, anyway.

So it was nice, seeing those doll heads scattered about, pouty pink lips smiling in little pursed bows.