Results May Vary (5 page)

It was the same pattern he enacted anytime I was upset with him—poignant apology, followed by heartfelt declarations of love, with a strong implication that I shouldn't let my resentment impede our return to peace and harmony. Because in love, it wasn't worth holding a grudge over a slight. When it was something like booking plans in the city when I wanted him to attend one of my work events, I was inclined to agree with him. But infidelity?

I walked down the hall to his office, switched on the paper shredder, and fed the letter through. The growling crunch of the teeth as they ripped their way through Adam's words was very satisfying indeed.

I was ensconced in my favorite rocking chair on my back deck, watching a coral and gold sunset drain from the sky with two big glasses of Adam's prized vintage dry Riesling inside me, when my sister, Ruby, called. Because of course she would call right now. Even under the best of circumstances, I was never fully prepared for the mental energy required by interaction with Ruby, and she had a knack for timing her infrequent calls and visits to coincide with my moments of weakness and fatigue. But I'd seen a few texts from her when I reluctantly turned on my phone this morning after my Adam-induced technology blackout, so I supposed I'd have to stop hiding.

I took a deep breath and answered the call.

“Oh my
god
, Care. Where the hell have you been? I've been trying to get ahold of you since the weekend. We were supposed to get brunch yesterday, but you never texted me back.”

It was odd to realize that, as far as Ruby knew, I'd had a perfectly normal weekend, with no justifiable reason for ignoring her. Even if I'd seen the texts, what would I have said?
Sorry, can't make brunch; too busy trying to keep my organs from squirting out of this gaping wound in my chest.
“Oh, damn. I'm sorry about that.”

“Did you forget? Or drop your phone in the toilet, or what?”

“I forgot. And, uh, I forgot my charger, so my phone died and I didn't see your texts. I'm sorry,” I said, pronouncing each word like I was setting a bone china teacup in its saucer. She couldn't notice I'd been drinking or she'd know for sure something was wrong.

“Wow. That's something I would do, that you'd scold me for. Nice going, big sis,” she said, but her voice was teasing. “So anyway, we were thinking of leaving the city at two on Friday, which should put us up there around six, with traffic. Is there anything good on the roster?”

I pitched forward in my chair, my feet landing on the porch with a hard thump that yanked my rocking to a stop. Damn it—I had squelched so deep into my personal swamp that I'd completely forgotten my parents and sister were supposed to be visiting this weekend. It was their annual ritual since Adam and I moved up here: visit for opening night of one of the Williamstown Theatre Festival plays. Be squired from show to party to after-party by their playwright brother-/son-in-law. Adam loved it as much as they did, showing off his connections for my goggle-eyed family. They were arriving in four days and they had no idea Adam and I weren't speaking.

“Oh, Ruby, I meant to tell you,” I said. “I think we have to cancel for this weekend. Adam—” What was the lie going to be? “Adam had to go to a thing.”

“A thing?”

Work, brain.
“A conference. Of some sort.”

“On this short notice? In the middle of the festival?”

“No, he, ah, he forgot he had scheduled it. Stupid. But so, he's not here.”

“Geez, a lot of forgetting going on with you two lately. You must have the tickets, though, so why can't we still come?”

Why, indeed? “I just don't see the point. With him not here, and all.”

“Whatever. We're coming.”

“No. Seriously. Do not come. It is not a good time.”

A pause. Then: “Care, is everything okay?”

Oh, there was so much in it, that little sentence of Ruby's. Genuine concern. Worry. But there was this very, very,
very
faint note of—almost—hope? Hope that, for the first time in my well-ordered, smoothly executed life, something might not be going exactly right.

Of course, my sister would never actually wish any pain on me. But I wouldn't put it past her to feel at least a little bit glad that, for once, I had a problem. And, as it happened, the lady was in luck.

“Adam and I are having some issues,” I said finally. It was a sentence I had preselected on the long drive back to Massachusetts, for the inevitable moment when I would have to tell someone.

“Oh shit, Care. I'm so sorry to hear that.”

And she clearly genuinely was. A tactful person would let it rest at that, and allow me to volunteer any further detail I might wish to disclose.

“What sort of issues?” said Ruby.

I lifted my wine glass toward the light spilling from the house, and studied the way the familiar image of my kitchen window was distorted by the round glass and the liquid. “He cheated on me.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Your shock is really gratifying, thank you for that,” I murmured, swirling the wine.

“Because it's fucking shocking!”
she yelled. “Adam adores you! Adam thinks you're the most beautiful woman ever created by God's own personal hand! He annoys the living shit out of everyone around him because he won't shut up about it!”

“Well, perhaps that's the problem.”

“That he won't shut up about it?”

A firefly meandered near me, its belly glowing twice before I answered. “No. That I'm a woman.”

“I don't follow,” Ruby said after a moment, and it was such an oddly tentative, un-Rubylike statement that I had to laugh.

“Adam had an affair with a man,” I said, trying the words out. But they sounded blank, incoherent, just a sequence of sounds; it was as if those words, put together, created a sentence without a meaning that my brain could recognize. I waited for an explosion of astonishment from the other end of the phone, but all I got, after a good solid couple of seconds, was:

“Oh.” Then, another second or two later, “Wow.”

“ ‘Oh, wow' is right,” I said, and took another hearty glug of Riesling. When there was still nothing further forthcoming from Ruby, I continued. “So, I kicked him out. And that is why I don't want you and Mom and Dad traipsing about up here this weekend. There is no Adam, and as far as I'm concerned, there's no festival, either.”

I felt an unexpected gush of relief inside me as I said it. When it came right down to it, there was little I enjoyed about the festival. All the air-kissing and hugging—it was just so phony; everyone was only there to make whatever contacts they could to advance their own careers. And the plays themselves—I always enjoyed a good Shakespeare or other classic, but somehow the ones we went to with my family were always modern pieces in the running for “Most Pretentiously Abstract” and “Most Loathsome Characters.” All of a sudden, the fact that I could skip it this year was the lone puddle of light in the dark and moldy basement of my situation.

“Well, so,” began Ruby, “what are you going to do? Are you guys going to counseling?”

“Not at the present moment,” I said, and I knew, if she'd been paying attention, that she would have busted me then for drinking. Ruby identified years ago that, once I get a little drunk and then realize it and decide I don't want to be, I resort to unnecessarily formal language to try to camouflage myself. It actually annoyed Adam that he hadn't been the one to discover this particular quirk; Adam liked to be considered the ultimate authority on Caroline, to the exclusion even of the people who've known me since birth. He had a seemingly endless mental catalog of my stories, traits, and linguistic tics, and whenever he caught me doing one of my Caroline Things, he would get this affectionate, indulgent, and also faintly victorious smile on his face as he called me out.

I wondered if he had a list of Patrick Things, too.

“I have no idea what I'm going to do,” I said.

“And you hate it,” Ruby said.

“What do you mean?”

“Care, you have the least ability to tolerate uncertainty of anyone I know.”

“Oh, thanks, Ruby.”

“It's not an insult; it's an observation,” she sniffed.

“I am definitely going to use that comment on you someday.”

“Well, fuck,” said Ruby, in apt summary. “This is awful. I don't even know what to say.” Then, after a moment: “So…you're all by yourself up there, huh?”

“Yes, and what is your next question?” A long-standing Ruby Thing is that whenever she ends a question with “huh,” you can be confident she's leading you somewhere.

“How'd you like some company?”

“Like one of your foster cats? I'm still as allergic as I was last time you tried to foist one on me.”

“No, I was thinking something a little bigger. How about
me
?”

Oh Christ, no. I loved my sister but the prospect of her rambunctiousness shattering my contemplative solitude was not one I could handle. All I wanted for company were the fireflies, and the cicadas whose rattling song pulsed through the night air around my house.
Don't even bother, guys,
I wanted to tell them.
All you're gonna do is screw each other and die.

“Oh, peanut, thank you for offering, but I'm still pretty deep in the wound-licking stage—”

“All the more reason for me to come!”

“No, I mean, I am
deep
in that stage, Ruby. Deep.”

“Balls deep?” she said, before dissolving into laughter.

“You're disgusting,” I said, but I was grinning.

“See? You need me.”

“Ah, Rube, I just—”

“Look, I've got some wounds to lick, too, okay? We can hole up in your house together and drown our sorrows—although I sense you already got a head start on that—and we will rant about men and feel much better. It'll be awesome.”

Damn it. She
had
noticed the drinking. “What sorrows do you have to drown?”

“Burqhart broke up with me. Said he felt too much pressure to propose.”

Crap. Burqhart was the latest in Ruby's chain of utterly benign, utterly forgettable boyfriends. The most remarkable thing about this guy had been his name. “Well,
were
you pressuring him?”

“Jesus, Caroline, no. I wasn't. Why would you assume I was?”

“I didn't assume. I asked you. He had to have gotten it from somewhere.”

“Yeah. From the fact that his brother and his best friend just proposed to
their
girlfriends. Not from me. Unless the mere fact of my being a twenty-eight-year-old woman is a threat in and of itself.”

“And you didn't talk about timelines? Hypothetical wedding or honeymoon locations?”

“What the hell? No. Why are you so convinced I did something to deserve this?”

“You deserve it for sleeping with a dude named Burqhart,” I said, and swallowed another deep sip of wine.

Silence…then, gradually, I heard her laughing, the sound trickling out of her throat louder and louder until she couldn't pretend to hold it in any longer. Ruby can always take a joke at her expense if it's a fair one.

“See, you have to let me come. I will brighten your dreary days and give you something to laugh at.”

It took me a moment to realize I was smiling, too. Really, it wasn't the worst idea in the world. Ruby and I got on each other's nerves if we spent too much time together, but two days was a manageable amount of time, and it would be nice to have another human being with me in this oppressively empty house.

“Okay. Okay! You can come. But not Mom and Dad.”

“Yay! Sister time! What are you going to tell them, though?”

“I'm sticking with the business trip story for now. I have to see how it goes for the next little while before I figure out what to tell them.”

“No kidding. Mom is going to
freak out.
”

I groaned and shoved the thought away. I was categorically not ready to deal with my mother. “Yeah. She is. So back me up on the business trip, please.”

“Yup, yup, yup. Hey, will you get all my foods for me?” said Ruby, with a six-year-old's enthusiasm. “Cocoa Puffs and Cheetos and those frozen mozzarella sticks that turn all flat and melted in the microwave?”

“You want to eat all your favorite disgusting foods in one weekend?”

“Yes,” she said. “I'm embracing my breakup weight. I am diving headfirst into it. My soul will be cleansed of its sorrow by the soothing embrace of General Mills.”

“Okay,” I laughed, “I will get your foods. Text me what you want.”

“Thanks, sis! Look, man trouble is a shitty reason for us to get together, but we're going to have fun. I promise.”

As I hung up the phone, I couldn't quite reach my sister's level of optimism that I would be able to describe any part of my life as “fun.” But there was no doubt the girl could make me laugh, and that, at least, was an improvement.

I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be.

—Clementine Churchill to her husband, Winston, June 17, 1940

I had known my deep-freeze silent treatment wouldn't work on Adam for long; like any force of nature, he abhorred a vacuum. So I was not surprised to find him when I arrived home from work the next day, waiting for me in our driveway in the middle of a fierce afternoon thunderstorm, in a stupid yellow hatchback with the Zipcar logo on the side.

He was in the driveway because he couldn't get inside. I'd changed the locks. I pictured him, scrambling up the front steps in the rain, only to stand on our porch dripping and confused because his key wouldn't turn. I was sure he hadn't expected me to do that. It felt good to thwart him.

I was also sure he hadn't brought an umbrella with him, because checking the weather app on his phone at the beginning of the day was simply not a skill Adam had ever acquired. He relied on me to check, and to tell him anything he needed to know. I was his own personal Al Roker; just as, for any of our shared decisions or plans, I was the coordinator, the cruise director, the tour guide.
This way. Follow me.

My heart was pumping with such sickening force that I could see the open collar of my blouse trembling when I glanced down, but I would not let Adam see that I was rattled. As calmly as if he weren't there, I killed the headlights, turned the car off, and engaged the parking brake. For all that Jonathan teases me about my driving, I have always believed in the parking brake. I popped my umbrella open and stepped out into the downpour.

I heard the thump of Adam's car door closing, and then there he was, standing in front of me. No umbrella. I honestly think I could have respected him in that moment, just the tiniest little bit, if he had only brought his own goddamned umbrella. Instead, water crashed down from the leaves of the big maple over our heads, around the ineffectual palm he held above his face. It splatted into his hair, turning it the color of wet cardboard, and ran in rivulets over his forehead and cheeks. I choked down hard on my instinct to shield him, and I choked down even harder on the love that surged inside me at the sight of him, standing in front of me in supplication. I squeezed and crushed that love until all I felt was rage.

“I have nothing to say to you,” I said, clutching my umbrella handle in front of me like a shield. As badly as I wanted to understand what had happened to me, the mere fact that he was here now, ready to talk, made me want to deny him.

“Can we please go inside and talk?”

“No.”

“Caroline.”

I gripped the handle tighter, my sweaty palm slipping on the sleek wood. “I'm not interested.”

“Sweetheart, you can't just refuse to speak to me forever.”

“Watch me.”

He wiped his dripping hair away from his forehead and shook a raindrop off the end of his nose. “Caroline.
Please.
”

With a sudden rush of sound, the pace of the rain spiked, the way it does just when you're thinking it cannot possibly rain any harder. The water pounded so hard on my umbrella that I could feel the vibration in the handle. I swallowed, whipped my body around so my back was to him, and walked toward the porch, my muscles tightening from the rigidity of my posture. Adam waited behind me while I collapsed my umbrella and shook it off, but I didn't reach inside my handbag for the keys. I tossed the umbrella on the floor of the porch and turned back to him, arms crossed over my chest.

“Say whatever it is you want to say, and then you're going to go.”

He splayed his hands. “Seriously? I'm sopping wet, and you're going to keep me stranded out here?”

My nostrils flared. “Nobody forced you to get out of the car.”

He closed his eyes and sighed. “I'm sorry. I think I got off to a bad start here.”

“You pictured a
good
start to this conversation?”

When he opened his eyes again, they were brimming with tears. “Please. Please just let me tell you I am sorry. And that I love you more than anything on earth.”

“Not more than you love yourself, clearly.”

“I'm a selfish, worthless piece of shit. And I am so sorry. I will never be able to apologize enough for what I did to you, but I would like to spend the rest of my life trying.”

Air chuffed out of me in a grotesque laugh. “Gosh, that sounds so appealing. Sixty-three years old, and still having to listen to you apologize for sticking your dick somewhere it didn't belong thirty years ago. No, thank you.”

He lowered his head, the picture of abject contrition. “I know.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to push back the headache I could feel building like a thundercloud. “Adam, I don't care that you're sorry. I really don't. It is the absolute minimum acceptable response to this situation, so I'm not going to give you a gold star for telling me you're
sorry
for what you did. I need—I want to know why you did it,” I said, my voice breaking for the first time.

He shoved his hands in his jeans pockets and shook his head, staring out at the mist-shrouded ridge of the hills beyond the river. Rain drummed on the roof of the porch while I waited for him to speak. Finally he dropped his eyes to his feet again. “I don't know,” he whispered.

“You drove all the way up here to plead your case and you can't even tell me why you cheated on me?”

He shook his head.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I shrieked, hands thrown wide in disbelief. “Try! Just open your mouth and say something!”

“Caroline, I don't know! I don't—” He swiped a tear off his cheek with the base of his palm. “It's so messed up and confusing.”

“Experimenting with a little cock confused you?”

He flinched. It always freaked him out when I used rough language. “No, it's…I honestly don't know how to explain.”

I paused to gather myself. I knew better than this; getting information out of Adam when he didn't want to give it had to be done like coaxing a cork out of a wine bottle. The slow, careful, steady pull and then the
thwop
of release. “Okay. Let's make it easy; I'll give you yes or no questions. Was this the first time you cheated?”

“Yes.”

“Was it going on for a while? It had to have been.”

“Yes.”

Sweat prickled my armpits as I paused to weigh my next question. But I had to know. “Do you love him?”

“No.”

“Do you still love
me
?”

“
Yes!
I've been trying to tell you, I—”

“Aren't you attracted to me anymore?” I said, hating the way my voice trembled. I sounded like a whimpering child.

Adam stepped toward me and took my hands in his. “Oh my god, Caro. Sweetheart. Of course I am.”

I forced myself to jerk my hands free. “Are you bored with me?”

“No. I'm not bored. But I think—I guess a part of me just wondered. What it would be like to be with someone else. We were together from such a young age; we never got to explore who we were with anyone other than each other.”

“You don't explore
after
you're married, you son of a bitch!” I screamed, my fingernails digging into the flesh of my palms.

He threw his hands in front of him. “I know! I know. I'm not trying to defend it. You asked me why.”

“So you just…decided to explore?”

“Not just like that. This is the part that I don't know how to explain.”

“
You are a writer.
And you can't find the words?” But it was as if someone had quite literally stolen his voice. The humid air, sweet with the scent of summer rainfall, thrummed around us, but still Adam didn't speak. Finally, I exhaled a weary, shuddering sigh. “You know what I want to know. Are you going to be able to tell me?”

A muscle worked in his cheek. “I'm not gay, Caroline.”

“You had sex—pretty damn enthusiastically, it looked like—with a man.”

“That doesn't make me gay.”

“It makes you bisexual, at the very least. And since when? How did I not know this about you?”

He scowled and nudged his shoulders upward slightly. He was hunched into himself, poised in defense against me and my barrage of questions that he did not want to answer. I stared at him, at his beloved face, with the angular nose and the upper lip that was so much slimmer than the lower one, and the pronounced groove between nose and lip that was one of my favorite places to kiss. Had Patrick found that groove, too?

“I can't talk to you anymore,” I said, dropping my gaze while I opened my handbag, as if my keys would be anywhere besides their dedicated side pocket. “Do you have your laptop with you in the city?”

There was a beat before he answered. “No. But what does that—”

“Okay. Then I'll get it for you. But then you need to go.”

“Sweetheart, no. I'm not going.”

“You have to.”

“Caro—”

“You have two choices. You can walk into the house when I open this door, knowing that I don't want you here and I won't speak to you, or you can turn around and drive your little rented car back to the city and leave me alone.”

He spun away from me and planted his hands on the porch railing, staring out at the rain.

Without looking at him again, I let myself into the house and retrieved his laptop, cord, and mouse from his office, then stuffed them into the black nylon case that hung in its usual spot on a peg behind the door. I detoured to the laundry room to pull a dry T-shirt from the stack of folding we'd left behind in our hurry to get to the city last weekend. At the last second, I grabbed his umbrella, too—navy, with the Yale crest on it. Don't ask me why a grown-ass man still carried an umbrella with his college colors on it, because I'd asked Adam that pretty much every time I saw him with the stupid thing, and I'd never gotten a respectable answer.

I fully expected to find him in the living room when I returned, but he was still on the porch, staring at the sheet of water that pelted down beyond the shelter of the roof. Silently, I handed him his bag; he cradled it awkwardly in one bent arm.

“Okay. You're all set.” When he didn't move, I sighed. “Adam, I need you to go. That's how this is right now.”

“But we have to try to fix this. Nothing will get better if you refuse to speak to me.”

“Nothing will get better if I don't understand why this happened. I just asked you a couple of very important questions, and you couldn't answer them. Anything we say to each other has to start with you answering those questions.”

He pressed his free hand to his eyes; tears seeped out from under his shaking fingers. “Please don't do this, Caro. I love you too much.”

Adam was the only person who called me “Caro.” Everyone else preferred the simple, natural “Care” if they were going to truncate my name, but not Adam. Adam liked the unusual sound, the “awkward elegance” I believe he called it, of that final
o.
It was so typical of him, to prefer the thing that was special.

And Patrick Timothy was certainly very special.

“Stop acting like I'm being cruel to you,” I said. “This is all happening because of a decision
you
made. Please…I am begging you to leave me alone. I can't stand to have you near me right now.”

He slid his hand down to his mouth and stared at me, eyes searching mine. Then he yanked his hand from his face, nodded once, and stalked across the porch and down the stairs. A minute later, I was watching the yellow car reverse way too quickly down the driveway, spitting gravel.

“Be careful!” I screamed. The highway down to New York is dangerous even on a clear, dry day; and I was so angry that I'd just sentenced my husband to drive it in tears, in a thunderstorm, in the growing dark. After listening to me spit out words as vicious as a whip to the face.

What in the name of god had he done to us?