Skipping a Beat (15 page)

Twenty

WEST VIRGINIA WAS ONLY a few hours away, but I rarely went back home to visit. Shortly after Michael and I eloped, though, I made the trip—mostly out of guilt over not inviting my parents to the wedding. They’d just moved out of my aunt and uncle’s place and were living in a house owned by an elderly woman who had vacated it to move in with her daughter. In exchange for rent, my father, who’d always been handy, was fixing it up after years of neglect.

Those twenty-four hours were among the worst in my life. The shabby little house couldn’t contain the tangle of feelings swirling around inside it, and although we all tried to be upbeat—to gloss over the anger and hurt in our shared past, if only for a day—we kept stumbling. Every conversation felt stilted, every memory held a hidden land mine, and the distance between my parents and me seemed to have grown exponentially since I’d left, leaving a gap that felt impossible to traverse.

It was obvious my father was trying, in his own awkward way, to fix things between us by repairing tangible problems: He changed the oil in my car, hurried out to buy a box of Lipton’s when I asked if there was any tea in the house, and insisted on carrying my overnight bag up the stairs to the guest room.

“I just painted it last week,” he said, and I smiled and pretended that I loved the rose petal pink shade on the walls. It had been my favorite color, but that was when I was sixteen—the last year my father and I had really known each other.

My dad seemed to feel the need to constantly stay in motion, as if by doing so, he could find relief from the heavy emotions pressing in on us. “After I change the oil, I’ll put a little air in your tires,” he said as he wiped my car’s dipstick on his old canvas work apron.

“That would be great,” I said, not letting on that I’d filled them up at a gas station before I left D.C. I sat on the grass next to him and chatted a bit about my job and Michael’s new company, but it felt strange. My father did odd jobs around town, cleaning gutters and repairing leaky sink faucets, and here I was talking about the dinner for a hundred people that I’d organized at a fancy country club. My successes only seemed to put his failures in stark relief.

After a while my voice trailed off and I stood up. “I should check on Mom and see if she needs help with dinner.”

She’d cooked a pot roast along with steamed carrots and baked potatoes—the kind of simple, hearty food she’d always made while I was growing up—and the smells brought my childhood rushing back. I remembered the countless times I’d banged open our screen door after school and had caught a glimpse of my mother turning around from the stove, a long wooden spoon in her hand and a smile washing over her gentle face as she caught sight of me.

Now she was scrubbing dishes in a sinkful of soapy water. When I went to help, I saw how red and chapped her hands had become, and the sunlight streaming in through the window over the sink highlighted the sharp new lines creasing her face. Even the pan she was holding looked crummy and old. Suddenly a rush of fury at my father overpowered me, even though by now I understood more about his disease. He was probably genetically predisposed to having a gambling addiction, I’d learned by reading a psychology journal. The traits I used to admire in my father—his constant chatter, his loud, almost forced laugh at gatherings, even the way he scarfed down food—were tied in to an anxious disposition, which was often an underpinning for the illness.

But understanding my dad’s addiction didn’t make it easier to accept. My mother had worked so hard all of her life; she should be retired by now, sitting on a porch and working on the knitting projects she loved, even planning a big trip for the first time. Instead she stood for eight-hour shifts, hustling for tips.

“Sit down,” I ordered my mom. “Let me wash that.”

She shook her head and kept scrubbing at a stubborn spot. “It’s fine, honey. You just relax.”

But none of us could.

Our initial unease only deepened as we exhausted our superficial chatter, and every time a silence fell over the dinner table, we all began talking animatedly at once, which only made things more awkward. At one point my mom asked about Michael’s new company.

“He’s sorry he couldn’t come. He’s working crazy hours, trying to get it off the ground,” I said. Back then I could laugh about it, imagining it would be a temporary thing. “But hey, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you come visit for a few days? I could show you around D.C.”

“That sounds like fun!” my mom said. “Steven? What do you think?”

I let only one syllable slip out—“Oh!”—but those two letters conveyed so much: surprise that my mom had invited my father when I’d intended the invitation for her alone, and a hint of disappointment, too.

Dad quickly took a bite of pot roast.

“You should go alone,” he finally said, dabbing his mouth with his napkin. “Go have fun.”

“Of course you can both come,” I said. “You
should
. It’s just with Michael working all the time, I thought it could be a girls’ weekend. That’s all.”

“Sure,” my dad said lightly, but he didn’t meet my eyes.

That night I went to the bedroom and lay in the darkness as memories flashed through my mind: Dad stocking shelves in our general store and juggling cans of soup to make me laugh. Dad flipping me in my pink footsie pajamas over his shoulder and carrying me around the house, shouting, “Where’s my Julie-girl? I can’t find her anywhere!” Dad coming home late at night to my aunt and uncle’s house, his face drawn and dark, while I lay on the thin, stained mattress of a rollaway cot, feigning sleep.

Around midnight, I heard the stairs creak and realized someone else was awake. I could tell by the heavy tread that it was my father. I impulsively threw back the covers and hurried after him.

I caught up to him in the kitchen.

“You couldn’t sleep either?” he asked, and I nodded, suddenly feeling tongue-tied. He went to the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of milk, then filled a saucepan and put it on a burner.

“This always did the trick when you were little,” he said. He opened a cabinet, took out a box of cinnamon graham crackers, and put a few on a plate, then folded a paper towel into a perfect triangle.

“Here you go,” he said, tipping the milk into a mug and setting everything on the kitchen table.

“Aren’t you going to have some?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I’m not hungry.”

I wasn’t either, but I couldn’t reject his midnight snack. I dipped a cracker in warm milk and began to eat.

“I’m glad you came home,” he said, settling into the chair next to mine. He gave a half smile. “Your mom brags about you all the time. The way you put yourself through school and started your own company. I always knew you’d do something special, Julie.”

I shook my head and started to tell him I wasn’t special; the other young people who lived in our apartment building all seemed to be doing bigger things. One was a legislative assistant to a U.S. senator, and another worked at the World Bank and spoke three languages.

But then I thought about my parents’ life: this small kitchen with the linoleum peeling up in a corner of the floor; this crappy little house that they didn’t even own; this tiny town, where the big news was the grand opening of a new building for the bank next summer.

“Thanks,” I said. The soggy cracker seemed to expand in my mouth, almost choking me, but I forced it down.

“You’ll be able to sleep now,” he said when I’d finished the last sip of milk. He took my dishes to the sink and switched off the light, and we both headed upstairs. But he was wrong; I lay awake for hours, staring up at the ceiling in the room filled with the tangy smell of fresh paint.

“Come to D.C. soon,” I said to my father the next morning as he carried my bag back down to the car. It weighed only about five pounds, but he wouldn’t let me do it.

“Sure, that sounds good,” he said, but I knew that he never would. I wanted to stay longer, to find a way to connect with my parents, and yet I was desperate to leave. As Dad was putting my bag in the backseat, a blue car pulled up behind us, dislodging a little cloud of dust.

“I was hoping to catch you,” a middle-aged woman said when she got out. “I brought by some grout for the bathroom floor.” She looked from my father to me. “Is this your daughter? She must be; she’s got your eyes.”

My father nodded. “This is my Julie,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Julie, this is Debbie. She owns this house. Her mom taught you second grade, remember? Mrs. Nix?”

I smiled. “Of course I do. Your mom was a great teacher. How’s she doing?”

“Not so good,” Debbie said, her shoulders raising and lowering on a sigh. “She’s in a wheelchair now. Her mind’s still pretty sharp, though, at least on most days. But your dad’s a really good man. He installed a ramp and widened the doorways so she could live with me instead of in an institution. He wouldn’t even let me pay him for the work, just for the materials.”

I looked at my dad, and because it was true, I swallowed past the lump in my throat and said, “He is. He’s a good man.”

After his company’s stock went public, Michael bought my parents their own house, just two blocks away from where I’d grown up, and he set up automatic monthly deposits into their checking account. It meant my mother could finally retire.

“What if my father loses it?” I asked. “He doesn’t have such a good record of keeping houses, you know.”

Michael shrugged. “I’ll buy them another one.”

In that moment, I felt so awash in love and gratitude to Michael for saving my parents that I couldn’t speak. Knowing they were taken care of eased my guilt for not visiting more often. I sent gifts instead—a fancy coffeemaker for my mother, a beautifully crafted pipe for my dad, a pair of plush bathrobes—and I called them every single week. I pretended that was enough, even though I knew better.

But when my marriage collapsed inward, I didn’t have room to think about anyone or anything else. It began simply enough—with another woman’s name in place of mine, and a lingering look—and it grew and grew, until it overshadowed everything good in my marriage: the way Michael looked into my eyes before he kissed me on our wedding day, the sweet notes he used to leave me, the painful but well-intentioned foot rubs he gave me when I kicked off my high heels.

Maybe every relationship contains an invisible, constantly shifting scale that measures the good and bad it holds. Things between Michael and me were so wonderful for so many years that sometimes I wonder if the bad was quietly building strength all along, waiting for the right moment to claim dominance and violently pull everything over to its side.

Twenty-one

I HONESTLY BELIEVED MICHAEL wasn’t doing anything but working during all those late nights at the office. I didn’t grow suspicious when my calls to his cell phone went unanswered, or when he packed his bags and headed out for frequent overnight trips. The only cliché that was missing was lipstick on his collar, but I still didn’t catch on, not until the evening when Michael and I went to a fancy political fundraising dinner downtown.

It was a work event masquerading as a social one; business cards were passed around faster than the crab puffs and mini quiches, and everyone’s eyes skimmed past the person they were talking to, in case someone more important was in the next group over. It was the sort of event that I hated but that Michael thrived on. I’d almost begged off from it, but I’d spent so little time with my husband that I ended up changing my mind. Maybe I’d convince him to leave early, I thought. We could sneak a bottle of wine into the back of our limo and have the driver take us on a nighttime tour of D.C.’s monuments.

But from the moment we arrived, Michael was swept into conversations that pulled him away from me. By then he’d joined the boards of a half dozen charitable foundations, and meetings consumed most of his evenings. He seemed to be on a first-name basis with half the people in the room. It had taken me a while, but it finally dawned on me that being rich wasn’t enough. What Michael really craved was power. He loved donating huge sums to politicians and being invited to events where members of Congress mingled with celebrities and elite journalists. He adored giving speeches about business development and new marketing techniques; no matter how busy he was, he always stayed and took dozens of questions from the audience, growing visibly more expansive as everyone hung on his words. It was as though Michael had finally been permitted to join an exclusive club after years of having its members toss him their keys and order him not to dent the Porsche or Mercedes when he parked it.

He was in his element again tonight. After we accepted cocktails from a passing waiter, a guy I vaguely recognized as a former secretary of commerce walked over with his chest puffed out in the self-important manner of both mating bluebirds and D.C. politicians. He vigorously pumped Michael’s hand—hand-shaking was practically a sport in Michael’s new crowd—and when the conversation turned to the ever-sexy topic of the U.S. census, I slipped away before I keeled over from boredom. I wandered through the room, checking out the flowers and nodding in recognition at a waiter who had worked some of my events. Eventually I found a table lined with rows of little calligraphed seating cards. I spotted Michael’s name quickly enough—he was at Table 12, right by the podium where the president elect would be speaking—but I couldn’t seem to find my card. I scanned the rows of names twice, then a third time—and suddenly my vision blurred and the voices in the room became distorted and dark, like a record being played backward.

Roxanne Dunhill, Table 12
.

I grabbed the edge of the table to steady myself, then snatched up the card, as if by doing so I’d be hiding the evidence, camouflaging my anger and shame.

“Ready?” Michael asked, coming up behind me and putting his hand on my hip. I shook it off.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. I twisted around to face him and silently held up the card with a trembling hand.

He frowned at it. “They made a mistake.” He shrugged. “Wait a minute. You don’t think …?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I said, my voice shrill and too loud. I stood there, silent and shaking, as another couple wandered over and found their cards and then walked away again.

“Someone made a mistake,” Michael repeated.

“Someone thought she was your wife. Why would they think that, Michael?”

Michael spread his hands out to the sides in an expression of innocence, even though he couldn’t prevent the nervous facial twitch I’d seen so many times before, like when he’d been caught trying to slip me a note in twelfth-grade English class, and the occasions when he’d fibbed his way out of social engagements that didn’t interest him. His voice was
too
firm, too confident—and the net result was the opposite impression of the one he’d been trying to give. He was lying.

Had I known this moment was coming? I wondered. I’d felt something—an instinctual warning that felt like a mild electric shock—when I met Roxanne, the public relations manager Michael had hired a few months earlier. Something about the way she looked at him and smiled before skimming her eyes appraisingly over me made me draw in my breath and move closer to my husband. But later I’d dismissed it as an inconsequential crush on her part. She was young, had the body of a ballerina and the name of a porn star, and was probably infatuated with Michael. It wasn’t my favorite recipe, but I could choke it down.

That’s what I told myself again a few weeks later when I opened the morning paper to see a photo of them in the owners’ box at a basketball game. I hadn’t gone—Michael had invited me, but I wasn’t feeling well and I’d begged off, knowing it would be a long, rowdy night. Roxanne stood next to him in the photo, her nails grazing the sleeve of his rolled-up white oxford shirt. He was looking straight at the camera, but she was smiling up at him.

She looked like a cat, I’d thought, trying to objectively assess her triangular face and big, long-lashed eyes. Michael probably found her attractive—who wouldn’t?—but he was twisted away from her in the photo. He was watching the game, while she watched him.

What would I have seen if the camera had snapped a few moments later? I wondered. Would his dark head be bent closer to hers? Would her hand still be lingering on him, maybe moving up to caress his biceps?

But there were lots of people around them in the photo, including employees from Michael’s office and the other team owners. It didn’t mean anything, I’d told myself, folding up the newspaper and tucking it deep in the recycle bin. It
couldn’t
.

“Julia. This is silly.” For a moment, I thought Michael was reaching out to embrace me, but instead his hand grabbed the seating card out of mine. He tore it up and shoved the scraps of paper into his pocket.

Julia
. He’d been introducing himself as Michael and calling me Julia for years, as if our old selves were skins we shrugged out of when we moved to D.C. I’d stopped by to meet him for lunch at Georgetown University one day and discovered his classmates were calling him by his full name.

“Mike sounds like a little kid,” he’d said with a shrug when I’d asked about it. “Did you ever think of calling yourself Julia?”

I’d rolled my eyes, but later that night, I tested out the full name on my birth certificate, which no one, except a substitute teacher in school, had ever used before. I wrote it down on a piece of paper and said it aloud. It sounded elegant and sophisticated, I thought, even though using it made me feel like I was stealing someone else’s identity.

Now Michael was nodding hello to another man across the room while I stood there, feeling nauseated from the onslaught of hurt and jealousy.

Didn’t he care how I felt anymore? Who
was
he?

“I want to go home,” I said. I wrapped my arms around myself, feeling as if I might splinter into a thousand pieces.

“Julia, come on,” he said, lifting his hand to wave at someone else. “Everyone’s waiting for us.”

I looked at him in disbelief: he cared more about what people thought than he did about my feelings. I weighed the only two options I could see: storm out, or follow him to our seats. The organizers of tonight’s event assumed Roxanne was his wife. I wondered what they’d seen or heard.

A waiter walked by, and I grabbed a glass of white wine off his tray and gulped a third of it down without tasting it.

“Sweetheart,” Michael said. His tone was pleading, but his smile was firmly in place. If anyone glanced at us, they’d have no idea what was unfolding.

I looked around the room and realized no one in here was a true friend. If I left, people at our table would gossip about my empty seat, but no one would miss me. Would Michael leave, too? I wondered. Or maybe he’d stay the whole night, charming everyone at our table after murmuring a quick explanation about how I’d suddenly taken ill. A few years ago, I wouldn’t have had to question how he’d react.

I was wearing a two-thousand-dollar Issey Miyake dress and my earlobes hurt from the weight of my diamond-encrusted hoops. My husband was one of the most successful men in a room full of newsmakers. Yet I’d never been so miserable.

“Please …,” Michael said as the band struck up and the president elect and his wife walked in. Now everyone was on their feet, clapping and cheering, but in a minute they’d all sit down and Michael and I would draw attention.

I threw back my shoulders and walked to Table 12 and sat there for the rest of the damn night, smiling and chatting with the men seated on either side of me. I pretended to listen to the speeches, though I couldn’t have repeated a word of them. I clapped until my hands hurt, and smiled until my cheeks did, too. I drank another glass of chardonnay, then another, trying to make the image of her delicate hand against his sleeve dissolve. But it never did.

As the president elect’s words turned into a low, buzzing sound inside my head, I kept seeing the face of Rosina, the woman whose story was originally told by Rossini and picked up in Mozart’s opera years later. By then, she and the Count had been married for years, and they’d grown estranged. He tried to cheat on her with an employee.

Rosina found out about it, too.

I confronted him later that night—I yelled and I cried and I demanded to know what had transpired between them—but Michael denied everything. By now his face was a smooth mask, his features arranged in an expression of innocence.

“You’re having an affair,” I said. I walked up to him, got in his face, and spit out the words again, hoping to shock the truth out of him. But he just shook his head.

“It was a mix-up,” he said. “You’re making a big deal out of nothing.”

But I wondered. Of course I wondered.

As I lay in bed, I thought about the time, back when Michael and I were living in our old apartment, when I went out for “Sake Sunday” at the Japanese restaurant next door with three women who lived in the building. We’d all become friendly through the usual neighborly encounters—signing for one another’s packages, or watering plants if someone was away—and they’d invited me to their weekly gathering a few times before, but Sunday evenings were popular wedding times, and I almost always had events booked.

Even though I was a newcomer to the group, our rapidly disappearing cups of hot sake helped fold me into their intimate conversation. Marnie, one of the women, had separated from her husband a few months earlier, and she’d finally dropped off the last load of his things at his new place before coming to happy hour.

“A few CDs, a pair of his underwear that had somehow gotten mixed into my drawer, and some frozen pizzas that he loved but I could never stand. It felt so strange to see him in his new apartment,” Marnie said, her right hand unconsciously rubbing the bare finger on her left one. I could still see the slight impression the ring had indented into her skin. “My parents tried to talk me out of it. My sister did, too. Everyone thought he was a great guy … but he didn’t make me happy. The little things he did—the way he slurped up cereal in the morning, and threw the newspaper all over the floor when he’d finished with it—just drove me nuts.”

“I have to pick up after my husband all the time, too,” one of the other women said. She was a few years older than the rest of us and had been married the longest. “It’s something I’ve learned to live with.”

“Oh, he cleaned up the newspaper after he’d read the whole thing,” Marnie said. “But the way he left it scattered on the floor, instead of taking two seconds to just fold it back up in case I wanted to read a section …”

She glanced around the table and flushed. “It sounds like I’m nit-picking. Maybe I am…. I just always thought—if you love someone, shouldn’t you be able to overlook that sort of thing? But I never could, with Brian. I think we’ll be much better friends than we were husband and wife. Sometimes at night, hearing him breathe through his open mouth drove me crazy…. I felt like I had to leave before I started to hate him. That sounds awful, doesn’t it?”

“Why did you marry him?” I blurted, emboldened by the four cups of the vaguely medicinal-tasting sake.

Marnie leaned in, putting her elbows on the table. Her honey-colored hair swung forward, framing her oval face. “I dated this bad boy before Brian. He cheated on me, got drunk all the time, started a fight at a bar once when a guy flirted with me … he was a nightmare. But God, was he sexy….” Her eyes grew dreamy. “Anyway, I think I saw Brian and I knew he wouldn’t do any of those things. I didn’t see him for who he was, I saw him for who he
wasn’t
, and that was why I married him. It wasn’t fair to him. He deserves better.”

“My marriage …” The woman who cleaned up after her husband cleared her throat and took another sip before starting again. A bit of lipstick was smeared on her front tooth, and I wanted to gesture for her to rub it off so she wouldn’t be embarrassed when she noticed it later, but she was staring down at her sake cup. “My marriage isn’t a fairy tale. Whose is, though?”

“Everyone has to put up with some crap,” Marnie agreed. “The husbands do, too. I know Brian got tired of me being so bitchy…. But when I started fantasizing about sleeping on the couch—and you guys should see our couch, it kind of sags in the middle—it was pretty obvious. I couldn’t stay married to him or we’d both go crazy.”

“I don’t think I could leave my husband,” the woman with the lipstick on her tooth said. “Not that I want to,” she quickly clarified, “but unless he did something really awful, like hit me, I couldn’t just go.”

“If he hits you, you have to leave,” the third woman said.

“Or if he verbally abuses you,” Marnie added. “Then you walk away.”

If he gambles away all your money, you go
, I thought, wishing once again my mother had been strong enough to do just that.