The Girl Next Door (31 page)

She didn’t know how much he had noticed at first. He’d had a lot of work on, in the first couple of weeks of September. And a lot of what she did, he wouldn’t have known anyway.

She was forcing herself to do things she hadn’t done before. She was leaving Avery with Esme for chunks of time in the mornings. How hard that had been. She’d joined a Pilates class, and she went three times a week. At first she’d hated everything about it. She’d hated leaving Avery, hated biting back the instructions she wanted to bark at Esme, ensuring that every minute of her absence was filled as she thought it should be. Hated Avery not crying as she left. She’d hated the room full of happy, chatty women with unfeasibly tiny arses, and not being able to do the exercises so that she felt the way the instructor said she should feel.

Slowly, gradually, though, she was coming around. The instructor had known she was faking, and she’d knelt patiently beside her, explaining each move, and now she
did
feel it – she felt connected with her body and her muscles for the first time in a long time. You could see it, too, after a few weeks. At least
she
could see it, naked at home in front of the mirror. There was a new tightness across the midriff, and her shoulders were less hunched – she was aware of how she stood, how she looked. The hated pouch was smaller.

The freedom felt good, too. For the longest time, she had gone through life with a strict set of self‐inflicted rules. Where could the stroller go? When was nap time for Avery? Was this the right thing to be doing? Now she could go where she wanted, whenever. She could have her toenails painted, at 12.30, while Esme gave Avery lunch. She could shop for vegetables and fruits down at Whole Foods without having to let Avery count potatoes and steal grapes, and afterwards, she could take the escalators to the second‐floor stores and wander around J.Crew and Sephora, if that was what she wanted to do. Sit with a book in an armchair in Borders – an
adult
book, in the
adult
section. For ten minutes, or twenty. Or half an hour.

She met Eve one day, in Gymboree. Eve had two or three outfits in her hand. Kim wondered whether she’d mind being seen – the outfits were all definitely girly. But Eve had beamed when she’d seen her, holding up the clothes, and whispering conspiratorially – ‘Guess what flavour, then!’ Eve knew nothing of Kim’s struggle, and, for the first time in a long time, Kim was happy to talk to someone about motherhood, and about Avery, without mentioning the assisted conception. It didn’t matter. They talked while Eve paid, and then they wandered up the street together, and even stopped for a Jamba Juice, chatting about their daughters. Eve seemed lit up from inside, and Kim felt light, and easy.

The biggest revelation was how okay Avery was with this new mother, this new life. It made her dedication look and feel to her like martyrdom. Avery hadn’t needed her to do what she had done. This child, the one who spent time away from her, with Esme and with Jason, and turned a tiny bit golden in the warm September sunshine, and talked, in the bath, about children she’d played with in the park with Esme, was lighter and easier and giggled more.

Kim was, too. She could almost feel herself unclenching. Like she’d been holding herself taut and tense, for years. Which, of course, was exactly what she had been doing. And then, finally, starting to relax. The sky was not falling in because she wasn’t the one who woke Avery up from every damn nap she ever took. Or because Esme let her have a Mr Whippy ice cream from the truck on the corner of 76th street and Lex.

She actually liked Esme. She’d had no idea how lovely she really was. That made her feel ridiculous. Esme eventually felt brave enough, mystified but grateful at the change in her employer, to make a few suggestions about Avery. And Kim listened. It didn’t make her panic to relinquish control. Not entirely, but sometimes. What she had to force herself to do, at the beginning, driven by a creeping fear about Jason, became easier and more natural every day.

When they’d first been married, long before the dream of Avery turned into the nightmare of IVF, she’d cooked for Jason several times a week. Her office had been near Grand Central, where there was a spectacular market, manageably small, for commuters and harassed executives, but stocked with a huge variety of meat, fish, vegetables and cheeses. It had become a ritual. Two or three nights, she’d stop off there on the way home, to pick up fresh ingredients for dinner. She’d actually made things – marinades and sauces and even pasta, from scratch, in their small midtown kitchen, stuffed full of the aspirational appliances and gadgets they’d registered for at Williams‐Sonoma before the wedding. Food had been their aphrodisiac and their foreplay, and her gift of love to him, and mealtimes had been elaborate and lengthy, with candles on the table, a bottle of wine, and a CD in the player. And they had talked. How they had talked.

Now she wanted to get back to that. She wanted to get back to those people they’d been before they’d got separated in the maze of their lives.

She hoped they weren’t too lost.

Jason

He had noticed, of course. He’d noticed everything. The day she’d come back from the Hamptons, she’d been different. He’d been ready, after the summer, to talk about a divorce. He’d run the word around his head, tried it on. This wasn’t a life. This wasn’t how he wanted to spend the next twenty, thirty years. Maybe it was time to give up.

But then she started to make changes. At first the changes were small. She had her hair cut differently. She kissed him goodbye on the lips and not the cheek in the mornings, when he left for work, and she actually looked at him when she did. He thought she’d lost weight, not that she really needed to. Either that or she’d started holding herself differently.

The way she asked him if he’d be home for dinner was different, too. She always sounded hopeful. Now, on the nights when he said yes, he’d come home to a fragrant apartment, full of the smell of a home‐cooked meal. To a table laid for two. No CNN.

At first he was bewildered. He didn’t know what to attribute this to. Jason had no game plan. His behaviour wasn’t deliberate or calculated, and so he didn’t immediately see Kim’s new leaf as a result of something he’d done or said, or not done or not said. In August, he’d just been protecting himself. He didn’t have the energy to battle with Kim any more. It wasn’t who he wanted to be. But the night of the 4th July party at Rachael’s, when he’d looked in on his wife and daughter, made him realize that he needed to have his own relationship with Avery. He couldn’t rely on Kim to make Avery feel about him the way he wanted her to feel. Not warring with Kim was the by‐product of concentrating his efforts on Avery, not the other way around.

If you’d asked him, that July night, whether his marriage stood a chance, he’d have told you no. He’d have said that he couldn’t see a way through – that they were surviving on the memory of something that had once been good, and on the old promise of the people they had once been together, but were no longer capable of being. The fear he’d felt that night was not of losing Kim. He’d come to believe he’d lost her years ago. It was of losing Avery, his daughter. Without ever really knowing her.

He was disconcerted, a little, by this Kim. He did a great job of quashing any excitement or hopefulness. He couldn’t trust her. And he didn’t know if she was just forcing herself.

So the dinners were eaten, but the conversations were stilted and awkward. In the old days, they’d washed up together, and usually gone straight to bed, if they could actually wait until they got out of the kitchen. Now he thanked her, almost formally, for the meals, and insisted on doing the dishes alone, saying she deserved to put her feet up and watch telly.

He often thought, as he stood at the sink, staring into the windows of his neighbours, that if this marriage was a game of chess, then this was stalemate. He’d tried – he’d tried for a long, long time. He wasn’t trying now. Not really. Kim was. Trouble was – he wasn’t sure he wanted her to.

It was almost funny.

Emily

The alarm clock buzzed once, twice. Emily reached over without opening her eyes and pushed the ‘off’ button. But instead of swinging her legs out on to the wooden floor, she rolled over, her arm curling around Jackson’s smooth, brown back. The running didn’t seem quite so important these days. And the bike hadn’t come down off the wall in a week. She was in a cocoon. They were. She remembered the rest of her life, in moments. She thought of her mum while she showered. And of Charlotte, listening to NPR while she dressed. At work, she made herself think about what she was doing. But there wasn’t any food in the fridge, and she hadn’t checked her balance with Wachovia Bank in days. Everything, anything that wasn’t Jackson was a distraction. An interference.

She opened her eyes and looked at his face as he slept. The clock behind him said 6.15 a.m. They needn’t get up until 7.30. Jackson slept deeply, but when she moved away in her sleep he pulled her back unconsciously, tightening his grip around her waist, one hand possessively under her pyjama top, against her breast.

Last night, they’d kissed and touched themselves drunk, and she’d almost had sex with him. She couldn’t wait much longer. She didn’t want to. All the pieces were almost in place. She wanted him, that much was beyond doubt, and he couldn’t hide how badly he wanted her. She trusted him. Or at least, she wanted to, and she thought she was beginning to. She liked him. They talked for hours. And lay in silence for hours.

Emily had never felt like this before, and this guy, the guy in the bed with her – he was the last person she’d have ever guessed might do this to her.

But she liked how it felt.

Charlotte

Che must be on holiday. She hadn’t seen him for almost two weeks now. If she’d been braver, she’d have asked one of the others. Or the relief doorman. But she didn’t know his name. And she was embarrassed to sound interested in Che’s whereabouts.

She could have asked in Spanish. If she’d been brave enough. She’d been working really hard. She seemed to have a lot more time to herself lately. The garden was finished. Emily was busy with Jackson. She was happy for her friend, but she missed her. It was the story of her female friendships from high school and college all over again. She was all well and good until the next guy came along. Then she was easily dispensed with. Until the next heartbreak, when her services and sympathy were required again. It was a familiar pattern, and there was almost something comforting about it – the natural order was preserved. Emily wasn’t unkind or anything. She was besotted, that was all. And a romantic like Charlotte, who lived for that stuff, vicariously if necessary (and it always was), could hardly complain. It was just that they’d had fun, in the summer, the two of them. She missed her. Even Madison was in a strange mood lately – distracted and grouchy.

It was almost time. She was going to speak to him, as soon as he was back. She was going to ask him if he wanted to go out. Maybe for Halloween. Or to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Maybe sooner. Maybe by the time of the parade, they’d already be going out together.

In her mind, the encounter the two of them had had in the elevator, the previous July, had taken on qualities it hadn’t entirely possessed at the time. He’d held her glance for just a little longer. His smile had been more intimate. Their conversation more insightful. She’d built it up, and if she knew, in her heart of hearts, that it wasn’t all quite true, she also believed that soon, it could be.

To Charlotte, a woman who had dwelt in a sort of fairyland for most of her adult life, this was already as real as it got.

October

Rachael

Rachael hadn’t seen David for three weeks. He’d been to see the children, three or four times during the week, and at the weekends. She’d made sure it was Milena he saw when he came to the apartment. At first she was too angry. Too afraid of showing him how colossally hurt she was. Then too humiliated.

So far, the children hadn’t asked too many questions. Jacob was the only one who was likely to discern the difference between then and now – David had always travelled on business, and worked his fair share of late nights. If Jacob had wondered, he’d asked Milena, either through some innate sense that Rachael didn’t want to talk about it, or because it was Milena who happened to be around.

She knew she couldn’t go on like this indefinitely. Late at night, alone in bed, she wondered if she was overreacting. She didn’t even know the extent of what he’d done, did she? The details she’d found so abhorrent at the time now tortured her. She wanted to know everything. She needed to see him, but every time it seemed possible, that new cowardice she didn’t realize she had possessed surfaced, and she couldn’t.

In the end it was Milena who made her do it. Milena was the only person who knew. She hadn’t been able to tell anyone else – not her friends, who were, anyway, mostly their friends, not people at work, and certainly not her mother or father. One evening, while Rachael was folding laundry, Milena was finishing the dishes, and after she came and sat at the kitchen table with her.

‘You need to talk to him, Rachael. You need to sort this out.’

‘I know. I don’t know what to say to him.’

‘Let him talk. Then you’ll know what to say. You need to give him the chance to explain to you. You need to know what’s happened. You can’t make any decisions about the future when you don’t even know what he’s done.’

‘Does it matter? Are there degrees? Isn’t cheating cheating?’

Milena smiled, and clicked her tongue. ‘Of course not. There are a thousand degrees, lovely girl. Sex, love, soulmates. Infidelity of the mind, of the heart, of the body parts. Most important is why. You need to know why.’

‘Are any of the degrees okay, Milena?’

‘No, chicken. None of the degrees are okay. Nothing that hurts you, or risks hurting the children, is okay. But some things can be forgiven more easily than others. If you choose to.’