The Girl Next Door (17 page)

Kim would stand there, one hand protectively around Avery, lest she should slip or slide off the car, and make promises to herself, silent, fervent promises to try harder, to make this weekend better than the last.

It usually went awry before they even got back to the house, after the dry‐lipped kiss on the cheek he gave her as he tossed his bag into the back of the car. On Friday nights Jason was tired, and, it seemed to her, full of brimming resentment about his work week, spent alone in the city. He never seemed pleased to be there, pleased to see them.

Before his last visit, she and Avery had made flags from coloured paper, and on the Thursday night, after Avery had fallen asleep, she’d strung them up around the sitting room. He didn’t notice as he walked through to the stairs the next day. And when he’d come back down, having changed into a pair of pull‐on cotton trousers and a T‐shirt, barefoot, and she and Avery had shown him what they’d done, his smile never reached his eyes, and it barely slowed his passage to the fridge in search of a cold beer.

They seldom made love. She’d rejected him time and time again after Avery had been born. Now he never initiated sex, and on the few occasions when she did – not out of lust, or desire, but out of knowing that she should, that she must, he often rejected her right back, claiming exhaustion. She wondered if it was revenge – if he turned her down to show her how it felt to be unwanted, or whether she was, simply, no longer of interest to him.

So when it did happen, which was irregularly, it was weirdly unsatisfactory for both of them. There was almost something mean‐spirited about it, and she didn’t know which of them was more responsible for that. Afterwards, he never held her. He rolled off, and over and away. Here, in the country, their bed was at least a foot smaller than the one in the apartment, but he could still manage to put a lot of sheet between them, magic quilt or no magic quilt.

Kim knew they were in a terrible mess, but she didn’t know how to fix it. She wondered if he would leave her. She watched
Oprah
and
Dr Phil
and she knew they needed to talk – to each other, to someone else – but she was so, so afraid of what she would say, what he might say. And proud, and ashamed and frightened. She knew that the longer it went on, the harder it would be. The greater the distance between them, the longer the journey back.

So they didn’t talk. Not about what really mattered. They spent Saturday and Sunday, each longing for the short drive back to the bus stop, brittle, and polite, and functioning. Avery was a great distraction.

Jason

Sometimes Avery didn’t even feel like his own child – she was so much Kim’s that there was no room for him. He wasn’t allowed, never had been, to make even the smallest decision about her. What she wore, what she ate, when she did whatever she did, and with whom – Kim was in charge. No discussion, no debate, no interest, it appeared, in his opinion about any of it. She hadn’t even allowed him to change diapers, afraid that he’d get it wrong, make Avery sore. Nothing hurt him more (and many things hurt him these days) than walking down the steps of that damn bus on Friday nights and seeing no flicker of excitement in his daughter’s eyes as she watched him walk towards her. No squeeze in her small, thin arms around his neck. What the hell was happening? Kim, too. Her whole body language suggested trepidation. Whatever hopes he allowed himself on the bus evaporated now, before he even reached the car.

He still remembered the first time he’d brought her out here. God, he’d been in love with her then. His parents had separated them, which was pretty ridiculous considering they were practically living together in Manhattan by then, and he’d told himself as they kissed goodnight chastely on the landing that he could go a night without her easily enough. But he couldn’t, not then, and he’d crept like a teenager across the hall and into her room. He remembered her silently straddling him, arching her back so that moonlight hit her brown nipples as she rode him to an intense orgasm, made more exciting by the quiet, the cicadas and cadydids the only soundtrack to their lovemaking. Silence between them had once meant something so different. He’d decided to marry her that night, if she would have him. He was drunk on her – and her here, at the cottage, and her with his parents, in his family.

Back then, they’d made love almost every night – in his apartment, at her place. Once, at the Botanical Gardens, and, almost, in a yellow cab. They’d snuck out of a restaurant, where they’d been having dinner with ten friends to celebrate someone’s birthday, after the first course, to rush home and get each other into bed. One night they’d met for drinks after work at the Soho Grand, and she’d told him she was naked under her dress, and pushed a room key across the bar into his hand and they’d had unbelievable sex in the bathtub of a suite they didn’t need and couldn’t afford. He’d checked into a Hilton in Philadelphia on a business trip once and found her naked on the bed, having taken the train down that afternoon to surprise him.

He barely recognized this woman in the bed beside him now. Couldn’t map out clearly, even in his own head, how they had got here. And he didn’t know whether it was his fault. What he did know was that he couldn’t go on like this much longer.

He told himself sex shouldn’t matter. You could have other kinds of intimacy, couldn’t you? But it did, it mattered horribly. It wasn’t just the physical part, although that was tough enough. He felt ridiculously ashamed of his urges, as though they were wrong, and he was base for having them. Sex had been ruined for them both by Kim’s failure to get pregnant. It wasn’t a leisure pursuit any longer, it was a serious mission. They didn’t do it for fun any more, they did it to make a baby, and they were getting it wrong. Jason was humiliated over and again, in front of doctors and experts and Kim herself. She blamed him. She looked at him and in her eyes he saw her thought process – that this wouldn’t be happening to her if she’d been with someone else. And from day one, it was just happening to her. Not to him. It was inconceivable (every pun intended) that their failure to get pregnant should have been just as hard for him as it undeniably was for her. He’d wanted a baby. He’d wanted babies. He sat in an office surrounded by men who had big photographs of dimpled toddlers on their desks, and left early for parent–teacher conferences, and built sandcastles at the weekends and moaned about Disneyworld, and he wanted all that, too. And it hurt him, too.

He could rationalize that. He could make sense of why that process was so wretched and awful for both of them, and he could even forgive Kim for not seeing how it hurt him while she was lost in her own pain and fear. He could because he loved her, as he always had. It wouldn’t have hurt so much if he didn’t, after all. What man would not be hurt by not being able to give the woman he loved what she wanted more than anything else in the world? What he didn’t understand was everything since.

It should have been all right after Avery came. She was the much longed‐for baby. She was beautiful. She was the answer to the problem. Except that she wasn’t. Avery’s birth was just the beginning of the new problem. Kim hadn’t given much serious indication, in the years since Avery had been born, that she needed him, or wanted him, or even that she loved him.

Jason hadn’t thought much about love when he was a younger man. One of the things that had made him happiest, when he was first with Kim, was that this love he felt didn’t have to be analysed and evaluated and discussed. It just was, and it was wonderful. Easy and natural and right. Now he thought about it a lot, and he wasn’t sure any more that he believed in that kind of love. Because he didn’t think you could continue, indefinitely, to love someone who didn’t love you back. When it seemed to be the opposite of everything it had once been – no longer easy and natural and right but actually difficult and weird and wrong. Eventually your heart gave up. And he thought his heart might be almost at that point.

He wasn’t in love with Rachael Schulman. He knew that really. What he felt about Rachael Schulman was twofold. He’d certainly analysed that, because when he’d first realized he was harboring thoughts about his neighbour, he’d been terrified. The first was lust. On one unapologetically male and mammalian level, he’d just like to get her into bed. At this point almost everything about her turned him on, so that he sometimes felt like a stupid teenager, unable to control his lustful thoughts or rebellious body parts. This first feeling wasn’t too dangerous, because he understood it, as well as he understood, most of the time, that it was never, ever going to happen. Rachael Schulman might as well be Heidi Klum or Keira Knightley. The second was the one that worried him. He was in love with the idea of that kind of marriage – the kind that Rachael and David seemed to have. Not just the marriage – the family. The unit that they were. She’d become a kind of fantasy. The better she looked, the more he wanted to bask in the glow of their lives, and the worse his own situation seemed.

Saturday dawned hot and sunny. Kim was already up when he awoke. She got up with their daughter. Ostensibly, it was so that he could sleep in after a week at work. But he knew they didn’t mind his not being there. He could stay there, in the bed, all morning, and no one would come for him. He stayed there until nine. Then pulled on board shorts and a T‐shirt, and went downstairs. After breakfast, Avery demanded a trip to the beach. Jason lay back with his sunglasses on and watched Kim assiduously applying factor 150 to Avery, paler in July, it seemed, than she had been in March.

Kim must have burned herself earlier in the week – her shoulders still looked a little sore, although she refused his offer to put sunscreen on for her. He’d grown used to feeling a little like a leper – his touch, even in this most innocuous way, so often seemed repulsive to her. She was wearing an old sarong she’d bought on a trip to the Florida Keys they’d taken the year they were married, with a turtle print, and her ubiquitous Crocs, the hideous rubber footwear she owned in about eight different colours and styles and which he hated with a passion he might not have thought he could summon up over women’s shoes. He tried not to think of Rachael’s ballerina slippers and perfectly pearl‐pink toenails. Kim’s hair needed washing, and she’d pulled it back into a scrawny ponytail. She doesn’t care how she looks to me, he realized. She doesn’t want me to look at all.

All around them on this stretch of perfect white sand, perfect families reproached him. Fathers and sons in matching board shorts threw footballs endlessly. Mothers tended infants in those tiny UV tents and dispensed sunscreen and cold drinks from big plastic coolboxes you could wheel down on to the sand. Girls in bikinis trilled and squealed at the water’s edge as their toes hit the chilly water of Long Island Sound.

Suitably shielded from the sun, Avery plonked her fat bottom down in the sand a few feet away and began digging with her blue spade. Kim came to sit beside him. He sensed that she was searching for something to say. Small talk.

‘She digs for hours with that shovel. The other day she made a pile of sand almost as tall as she was.’

She was trying. Avery was all they had in common right now.

‘Does she!’ He tried hard to sound as though that remark had been interesting to him.

‘She’s quite strong, you know.’

He knew. Avery had rabbit‐punched him in the kidneys in the bathroom this morning. Her charming version of ‘excuse me, Daddy’ as he stood trying to shave successfully in the tiny mirror fogged up by Kim’s earlier shower.

‘Do you see people, out here, much?’

‘What do you mean?’ Her defensive tone was a warning, but he’d embarked. Sometimes, a row was better than silence. Who knew?

‘I mean friends, you know. People from Manhattan, or who live around here. Do you ever do social things?’

‘Of course.’ He didn’t dare ask what. ‘But mostly we just enjoy the peace and quiet and the beach and each other.’

This Zen‐like state clearly only happened in his absence, and not for the first time this summer already, he was painfully aware that she wished he wouldn’t bother to come out here and play at happy families. It was his house, damn it. His wages that paid for it all.

‘Didn’t Rachael say something about getting together out here?’

She looked at him sharply, and he wondered if his cheeks were red.

‘Rachael spends most of her time in Connecticut. That’s their house. The place they use here belongs to her parents.’

‘I know. But she said something about being out here for the 4th July weekend. I’m sure she did.’

She had. In an email shortly after their conversation in the elevator, back in April. He remembered it very, very well, of course. She’d said they’d all be there. With friends and family. That they always had a big open house kind of thing. That the Kramers should definitely come, if they were in the Hamptons that weekend. That Kim should give her a call and they’d fix it, give her directions.

Jason couldn’t admit that he didn’t need directions. He knew where the house was. About a year ago, the mailman had put the Schulmans’ mail in their box, back in the city, at the apartment. He’d collected it, and opened the first piece before he’d realized the error. It had been a note from Rachael’s mother, with a photograph of the boys she’d obviously taken and was sending to her daughter. He didn’t read the note (even stalkers had their own morality, clearly), but he had read the address, embossed in pink ink at the top of the card, with a tiny delicate starfish next to it. He’d returned the mail to the doorman, with a Post‐it stuck on the card on which he’d written – ‘Sorry! Didn’t realize it wasn’t ours!’ All jaunty exclamation marks! And the weekend after that, he’d told Kim he was going for a drive early one morning, and he’d just driven and kept on driving, all the way to Southampton, and found the house. He didn’t even really know why. It was one of the very big houses on a road just back from the beach, with private rights, no doubt. A beautifully maintained traditional grey and white colonial with a sweeping, manicured lawn and a long driveway. Down to the left‐hand side you could just see a sliver of pool house and turquoise water, and beyond that the net of a tennis court.