Something New (42 page)

“What are you doing home, Jonah? You weren’t supposed to come back till Saturday.”

“Yeah. Sorry to disrupt your schedule,” he says coldly.

He knows he knows he knows
is all I can think.
But how?

As if in answer, he says, “I read your blog.”

My mind reels.
My blog?
I can’t access enough words to form a question, but, again, I don’t need to. Jonah continues without being prompted.

“My mom showed it to me.”

Oh God, of course!
My mother-in-law has been an avid reader of the
Ladies Living-Well Journal
since its inception in 1963.

“Drove me crazy about it, actually.” Jonah laughs without warmth. “She’s been following the competition from the beginning, kept going on about this one blogger, almost as soon as we got there. Said I had to read it. Said all men should read it if they want to know how a woman’s mind works.”

Well, I’ll be goddamned. Margaret likes my blog. Margaret
agrees
with my blog. Margaret and I are like-minded about something. I don’t think this has ever happened in the entire course of our thirteen-year relationship. It’s a good thing she doesn’t know who wrote it, however; otherwise she would not only dismiss it as garbage, but would come after me with her husband’s precious rifle because
no one
messes with Margaret’s son.

“Obviously, she didn’t know you wrote it,” he says, his words mirroring my thoughts. “But I figured it out pretty quickly. Imagine my surprise.” He glowers at me. “Can you? Can you possibly imagine my surprise?”

I cross my arms over my chest, suddenly furious.

“Actually, I can,” I say defiantly. “I
imagine
it was the same way I felt when I found that sweet little love note hidden in your desk drawer. You obviously didn’t read my blogs closely enough or you’d know that I found it. Tell me, Jonah. Who is
T
? I figured the
J
part out all by myself. But the
T
kind of stumped me.”

The color drains from Jonah’s face and his shoulders slump.
He leans back against the arm of the couch, exactly the same way that Ben did earlier. In fact, I am having a vague sense of déjà vu as I wait for Jonah to explain his own extracurricular activities.

“It’s not what you think,” he says and I almost want to laugh at the cliché.
Almost.

“I feel so much better,” I snap, not feeling better at all. “Tricia, right?”

He nods but says nothing. A silence stretches between us, and I recognize this moment as a turning point. No cannons firing or cymbals crashing, just a quiet moment between two people whose future is unclear.

Jonah pinches the bridge of his nose between two fingers, then lowers his hand. He has the decency to look up at me as he talks. “Her brother died a few months ago. Car accident. Crazy thing. Fluke. She took it hard. He was all the family she had left. I thought I told you about it.”

I shake my head. He shrugs. “Maybe I didn’t.”

Maybe he did but I wasn’t listening. Or maybe he thought he did, but he wasn’t really speaking. Such is marital life.

“She asked me to go with her to the funeral, and I ended up taking her home and staying with her. I was afraid to leave her alone. I let her talk through it, get it all out.” He looks at me. “I didn’t sleep with her.”

I can tell by his expression that while he may not have done the nasty, he did more than just listen. But I am not angry. In fact, I suddenly feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. It’s not that each of our individual actions serves to cancel the other out. It’s because the rug has finally been pulled away, revealing the dust beneath. The dust that accumulates in a marriage. The dust that has to be swept up, whether or not the marriage is going to survive. His secret note and my anonymous blog have opened up
fresh wounds in our relationship, but perhaps open wounds are exactly what we need in order to start seeing and hearing each other again. And paying attention to the course of our marriage rather than allowing it to blow whichever way the wind carries it.

“Did you sleep with him?” Jonah asks quietly.

I drop my arms to my sides, no longer defensive, and really look at Jonah for the first time in a long time. He looks tired and sad and hopeful at the same time. He is worried about my answer, but ready to accept it, whatever it is.

“Does it matter?” I say. “I
wanted
to sleep with him. Isn’t that enough?”

His eyes focus on my face and I can tell that he is doing exactly the same thing to me as I am doing to him. Seeing me, as if anew. He slowly shakes his head.

I put my hand out to him and he takes it, then gives it a squeeze. A few seconds later, he stands up and opens his arms to me, and I step into them, feeling their strength as they envelop me. I slide my hands around his waist and rest my head against his shoulder, detecting his heartbeat against my cheek. Jonah’s hugs have been a constant in my life. He hugs enthusiastically, always has, and his hugs are an infusion of warmth and energy. But today, his embrace feels different. It feels like a safe haven, a calm port in a hurricane, a momentary respite from being alone in a big bad world. Today, his embrace feels like something new.

We stay that way for a long time, neither of us willing to break free. When the living room becomes full of shadows, and we hear the faint scratch of paws on the kitchen door, I lift my head and look up into Jonah’s face.

“We better let her in.”

He nods and kisses the top of my head. But instead of pulling away, I nestle my cheek upon his chest once more.

“Then,” I tell him, in rhythm with his beating heart, “I’d like to go pick up our kids.”

A
s it turns out, I was the overwhelming favorite of the blog competition, and readers demanded that I win first prize. Everyone, that is, except my mother-in-law, who, when she found out I was the one whose blog she loved, reversed her opinion about my posts, demanded that Jonah divorce me, and started an e-mail crusade to the
Ladies Living-Well Journal
in which she harangued them for awarding $10,000 to a cruel, heartless, adulterous debaucher. She has not spoken to me for months now, even goes as far as hanging up when I answer the phone. Since Jonah and I are making an effort to work on our marriage, I keep my derogatory comments to myself, but I’ll have you know that the next time she gets a jar of rose-infused honey from me will be the twelfth of friggin’ never. (But to keep Masood happy, I
have added dried dates and walnuts to my diet, which give me a boost of energy in the afternoons.)

I am now gainfully employed by the
Ladies Living-Well Journal
as their official blogger, and I also write a column once a month for their print magazine. Both the blog and the column are called—you guessed it—
Something New
. For the sake of literary greatness, or more accurately, pop entertainment, I undertake something new every week and then write about it, in the hopes of inspiring other women to get out and experience all of the wonderful things life has to offer. Not surprisingly, the
Journal
has asked me to tone down my colorful vocabulary, but this is no problem, as I have also set up a personal blog on which I can curse like a truck driver if I so choose.

For the record, since I know what curiosity can do firsthand, and it ain’t pretty, I will reveal to you the answer to the question that may be plaguing you. No, Ben and I did not. During our five-plus hours together, we talked until our throats were sore, held hands, laughed, joked, ordered in Chinese, watched a soap opera he claims he is
not
addicted to, talked some more, and even lay together on the bed cuddling. But over the course of our lengthy conversations about everything from our deepest, darkest secrets to the craziest thing we’ve ever done in public to our opinions on democracy in the Middle East, we got to know each other well enough to mutually decide that we shouldn’t go forward with the affair.

It wasn’t that we realized we didn’t like each other. Quite the opposite, actually. We liked each other even more than before. Sex would ruin it. It would be amazing for about an hour, but ultimately sleeping together would sour us. We agreed to be friends, friends with a delicious memory to revisit
whenever we needed to, friends who could call each other to pick up the other’s kids in an emergency, who could hang out with spouses present and not squirm with guilt. We also decided that if both of our marriages should mysteriously, spontaneously combust, we’d meet at the Four Seasons before the ink on our divorce papers dried.

I was afraid that the first time I saw him after our rendezvous would be awkward and uncomfortable, that Ben might ignore me, and that I should probably ignore him, too. But as soon as I reached the soccer field for the Saturday game, accompanied by my kids, their gear, and my husband (who never asked for my would-be lover’s identity and was never offered it, although deep down, he must have some idea), Ben waved to me from the fence, hurried over to help with our stuff, shook Jonah’s hand, and slung his arm across my shoulder like an old friend. And I suppose that’s exactly what we are now. Old friends.

Jill has started her own blog called
Marriage Whoa’s
in which she tracks her husband Greg’s every movement. (She writes under a pseudonym, of course.) Poor Greg. I almost feel sorry for him. Jill may never divorce him, but there is no end to his wife-inflicted, Web-published torment if he goes even a day without complimenting her in some way. She actually signed him up as a subscriber, along with all of his co-workers to whom she revealed the truth, so that her blog goes straight to the office e-mail for all to see. I have to say that I am very proud of her for being as proactive in her marriage as she is in all other aspects of her life.

My kids were thrilled that I won the competition, but upset that they weren’t allowed to read my blog. I requested that the
Ladies Living-Well Journal
remove the old posts from the Web in order to protect the innocent, and the magazine
graciously complied. I’m certain that some genius computer hacker could find it somewhere in the vortex of the vast Internet, but I’m pretty confident my kids can’t. They are too young to understand it right now, even Connor. Someday, when they are adults, if they ask me about it, I will let them each have a copy of all of the posts, which I printed up right after I won the contest. I’m not worried about what the blog will say about me, or what my grown children will think of me once they’ve read it. I’ll deal with that when the time comes. At some point, we all realize that our parents are not superheroes, but real live human beings. It’s natural and healthy. But for now, as long as it lasts, I’ll relish being Wonder Woman to my kids.

As for Jonah and me, we are taking every day as it comes. We have had our fair share of arguments over the past few months, but even those have been a welcome change from the ambivalence that’s been clouding our marriage for the last few years. We have given each other license to be brutally frank with one another about our feelings, our needs, and our expectations. If you were secretly eavesdropping on one of our conversations with some of Ben’s surveillance equipment, you might hear the following phrases: “You are hearing me, but are you actually listening?” or “You’re looking at me, but are you really seeing me?” or “Are you at all present in this discussion?”