Say When (4 page)

They lay in Zoe’s bed and read two chapters from her book, taking turns, as usual. Then Griffin reached over to turn out the light and kissed the top of Zoe’s head. “Good night, Zops.”

Zoe yawned. “Good night. When’s Mommy coming home?”

Griffin stood. “Don’t know. Pretty soon.”

“Will it be eleven o’clock?”

“I said I didn’t know, Zoe! Now go to sleep!”

“O
kay!”
She leaned over, reached under her bed, and pulled out her ancient panda bear. Then she lay back down, her eyes shut tightly in angry compliance.

Griffin sat on the bed beside her. “Hey, Zoe?”

“I’m
sleeping.
You said go to
sleep.”

“I think you’re right. I think it will be eleven o’clock.”

Zoe opened her eyes, studied Griffin seriously. “Okay.”

“All right?”

“Yes.” She closed her eyes, turned onto her side away from Griffin.

Griffin closed Zoe’s door halfway, as she liked it, and started down the hall for his own bedroom. Maybe it would be eleven. Maybe not. Whatever time it was, though, he’d know.

H
e dreamed that Ellen died. She died and then she came back and was sitting on the stone bench they kept near the bird feeder in the backyard. She was see-through: Griffin saw the outline of the branches of the bare rhododendron behind her. He stood before her in his overcoat and galoshes, weeping, and she, dressed in a filmy white gown, waved her hand as if to shoo away his grief. “Stop it,” she said. “Look what I’ve brought you.” She held a glowing blue bowl, filled with multicolored stones.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Just
look.”

He stared into the bowl.

“Well?” she asked, smiling.

“Aren’t you cold, Ellen?”

She stopped smiling, looked away.

He stepped closer, full of an awful longing that stole his breath, that made his fingers ache. “Ellen,” he said softly. “Tell me what it’s like.”

She looked up at him, her face full of bitterness. “It’s nothing like what you think,” she said. “Not at all.” She stood up, started walking away.

“Will you call me?” Griffin asked.

She turned around. “You know I can’t do that.”

“You can. I won’t tell anyone.”

She smiled sadly at him, then disappeared. He stared at the space where she’d been until he became aware of a knocking sound. It was Zoe, standing at her bedroom window, knocking at the pane and gesturing at something moving up into the sky. She knocked and pointed, knocked and pointed at something Griffin couldn’t see. She was smiling.

Of course the knocking in his dream was Ellen at the door. He jumped up quickly, then remembered, and looked at the clock. One-thirty. All right. He tried to muster up some righteous anger, but the dream was still alive in him, so that after he came down the stairs and undid the chain lock he said simply, “Sorry. Forgot.”

She didn’t look at him. She squeezed past him, hung up her coat, threw her purse onto the chair in the living room, and went upstairs. Griffin stood by the door, thinking. What had he intended to do? Confront her with the lateness of the hour. Tell her that she could not sleep in the same bed with him. Insist that they had to speak to Zoe, together. He had thought of telling her she had to move out, too, but now he was barefoot and in his pajamas, feeling the biting draft that leaked under the front door and wanting only for Ellen to say she’d made a terrible mistake, she was so sorry, she was back.

He went upstairs and heard the murmur of voices coming from Zoe’s room. “Someone from the PTO called,” Zoe was saying. “Daddy took the message.”

“Okay, sweetie,” Ellen said. “I’ll get it tomorrow. Thank you. You finish your water and go back to sleep, all right?”

Griffin moved quietly to stand outside his daughter’s door. Ellen was kneeling next to the bed, for a good-night hug. He saw the smallness of Zoe’s arms around her mother’s neck and remembered when Ellen was first handed her—streaked with blood, beaten ugly by birth, fists clenched tightly and trembling with newborn outrage. Griffin, his hands in his pockets, had leaned over to peer into Zoe’s face. “Looks like a boxer,” he’d said.

Ellen—impervious, bedazzled, had stared into Zoe’s eyes saying, “Oh, it’s you. It’s you!” She’d wept happily, rocked her baby in an instinctive and entirely unself-conscious way. She’d kissed Zoe’s tiny forehead, stroked her hair. Griffin had watched all this, fascinated by the spontaneous emergence of a person he didn’t know. He’d felt a momentary pull of intense jealousy—to be admired by her so! When the nurses told Ellen it was time to give Zoe to them, she’d laughed and said, “Don’t be ridiculous.” She’d kept the baby beside her every moment except when she showered—and then it was only Griffin she’d let hold her. The nurses, eyebrows raised, talked about her—yes, most mothers fell in love with their babies, but
this!
Ellen paid no attention to them.

Zoe had gotten a cold when she was only three weeks old. Ellen slept on the floor beside her crib at night, called the pediatrician so many times during the day that the beleaguered doctor finally called Griffin at work, begging assistance. “I think it’s that she’s afraid the baby might die,” Griffin tried to explain, but the doctor said no, he didn’t think it was that. He’d seen that before, he understood and was sympathetic to that; this was something else altogether. It seemed that Ellen didn’t want Zoe to experience any discomfort whatsoever. It wasn’t that she thought she was in grave danger: Her
nose
must not be stuffed. She must not
cough.
Apparently she wanted the world to be remade for her daughter. Really, if Mr. Griffin could not have a talk with his wife, he’d be forced to tell them to find another doctor.

So Griffin had told Ellen she had to stop calling the pediatrician, and Ellen had burst into tears. “Well, what are doctors
for?”
she’d asked, and Griffin had understood that she really meant it. “They are for really sick children, Ellen,” he’d said gently, and she’d said, “Oh. All right.” Then she’d looked up at Griffin with a face full of pain and said, “She’s too important. I don’t know how to manage a love like this.”

But she had learned. She’d gotten better. And now she was simply unequivocally
there
for Zoe. Zoe knew it, too, and Griffin was convinced that it was one of the reasons she was such a good kid—everybody liked Zoe, everybody said so.

“I love you, too,” he heard Ellen say, and then she came out of Zoe’s room. She started when she saw Griffin, and then the surprise left her face and was replaced by something close to hatred. She went downstairs, and Griffin followed her. He sat at the kitchen table opposite her. “It wasn’t the PTO that called.”

“I know. It was Peter.”

“Mr. Points and Plugs.”

“Peter.”

“Ellen, we have to talk about some things.”

She laughed. “As I’ve been saying.”

“Where were you tonight?”

She got up and went to the refrigerator, then closed the door without taking anything out. “Actually, mostly driving around, by myself,” she said. “I was trying to figure out what to do, what to say to you to make you understand, how to get you to sit down and just listen.”

“Well, here I am.”

She sat down, leaned in toward him. “Are you?”

“Yes. I am. We need to decide what to tell Zoe. She knows something’s up.”

“What do you mean? What happened?”

“Come on, Ellen. She just knows something—nothing definite. She can sense it. Kids always can.”

Ellen sat quietly for a moment, then said, “Oh, I’m so sorry about this, Griffin. If I could make myself feel differently, I would. But I can’t help it. I feel…like another person with Peter. Alive, you know?”

“Meaning you felt dead with me.” He laughed. “Is that it?”

She said nothing.

“Is that it, Ellen?”

“No. No, that’s not…” She reached across the table, touched his hand. “I didn’t feel
dead
with you, I just…” She leaned back in her chair. “Griffin. I’m going to turn forty years old and I have never…Look, I never believed in romantic love. Not for me, anyway. I never felt it. I
wanted
it, though. I’d watch all those sappy movies and feel this incredible
yearning.
…I didn’t think I’d ever get to feel those things inside myself. But when I met Peter, there was this instant—”

“Zoe wanted to sleep in the bathtub.”

“What are you talking about? Why won’t you just let me try to explain—”

“Frankly, I am not interested, Ellen. I could not care less about you and your greasy paramour. I told you, just do what you have to do. I don’t want to hear about it. What matters to me is Zoe. We have to tell her why things around here are going to change. And they are, Ellen. For one thing, I’m going to be going out, too.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean
I’m
going out, too. We’ll alternate nights. If you think I’m going to baby-sit every night while you live out your soap opera, you’re crazy. But we have a job to do together, and that is Zoe. She gets to have a mother, and she gets to have a father. I’m not leaving; I’m not going to move into some sterile apartment with dime-store silverware and cardboard-box end tables so that you can be conveniently rid of me. I am Zoe’s father, and I won’t be relegated to seeing her on fucking weekends, Ellen. I will stay in her life, every day, and I will stay out of yours. Aside from Zoe, anything we do from now on is our own business, and not each other’s. You want to be divorced? Fine, presto! we’re divorced. It is done—right here, right now, because I say so. All the rest of the stuff is a formality that we will get to in time.” He stood up.

“Griffin, sit
down.
I want to
talk
to you.”

“I’ll tell you something, Ellen. I’m getting a little bored hearing about what
you
want. And I’m tired. I’m going to bed. You don’t tell me what to do anymore: That’s the first thing. You don’t ask me for anything. And we will both talk to Zoe in the morning.” He turned to leave the room.

“Wait
a minute!” She stood up, grabbed his arm. “You can’t just leave like this, goddamnit! We have to have some
plan.”

Griffin frowned. “I just told you the plan. If you don’t like it…” He didn’t bother to finish. He went upstairs, flung back the covers angrily, and got into bed. He heard Ellen come upstairs, rummage around in the linen closet, then go back downstairs. “Fine,” he said aloud. “Good.” And then quietly, experimentally,
“Bitch.”
The word echoed inside him, a mournful reverberation that emanated from behind his breastbone and would not stop.

Hours later, he was still awake. He’d felt, standing over Ellen at the kitchen table, that he finally had things under control. That, now that the shock of first hearing the news had passed, he was actually relieved at the prospect of getting rid of her—even at moments of extreme adoration, he’d realized she was a royal pain in the ass. Oh, yes, he’d realized that. Ellen took the concept of “high-maintenance woman” to another level entirely. He wanted a low-maintenance woman, one who would sit and watch a Bears game with him and drink real beer and realize that sex was about giving as well as taking. Ellen made him nervous, she always had. She was ungrateful and mean-spirited.

But now he lay in the darkness thinking about what her life was like. What did she do every morning after he left for work? What did she think about? When had he stopped knowing about her? When did Ellen the individual get replaced with Ellen, my wife, as in Ellen, my car?

At four-thirty he went downstairs to stand beside the sofa where she lay sleeping. He heard her breathing, recognized the familiar pattern. He thought of a time Ellen told him about a game show where the host asked husbands to try to identify their wife’s hand—they could see nothing else of her. Most of the men couldn’t do it. “Could you recognize mine?” Ellen had asked, and he’d shrugged, irritated—he didn’t like questions like that, what was the
point
in asking questions like that? “No, but…could you?” she asked again and he’d said…yes, he remembered this exactly, he’d said, “I don’t know, Ellen. Probably not. How would I? It’s a
hand.”

He sat on the floor beside her, whispered, “Ellen?”

She slept on.

“Ellen, what is happening? What is happening, here? I’ve loved you for twenty years.” He reached out to touch her, then pulled back his hand. Perhaps she had heard him. Perhaps she would sit up, pull him to her, and laugh and cry simultaneously, saying, “Oh, God, Griffin, can you believe what we almost did? We must be so much more careful.”

But she did not awaken. He went back upstairs slowly and lay in bed until the sky lightened. Then he went downstairs to make coffee.

The noise awakened Ellen, and she came into the kitchen. She stood there, her pajama top buttoned one button off, her face lined with fatigue. He felt, in spite of himself, sorry for her. He smiled. “Good morning.”

Her eyes teared and she walked toward him and they embraced—out of habit, for consolation, to steady each other for the day ahead, Griffin thought. He buried his face in her hair, squeezed it in his hands, then let it go.