Then Came You (10 page)

Gabe had been surprised to learn that I was only twenty-two. “I thought you were older,” he said, then quickly added, “Not that you look old.”

“Don’t worry,” I told him. The truth was I felt older than my years, like I’d been a wife and a mother forever.

Most days I drove to work, but one night Frank dropped me off, keeping the car so he could take the boys to the free concert downtown that night. At the end of my shift I went outside to wait for the bus, and Gabe, driving by in his car, spotted me.

“You need a ride?”

“Oh, no. I’m going to take the bus.”

“I’ll wait with you.”

He parked the car and jogged through the lot, back to me.

“You don’t have to do this. I’m fine.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he told me. “I could use the fresh air.” We looked at each other, both of us knowing that the air in the parking lot wasn’t particularly fresh. It had been in the nineties for three days straight. The bus stop smelled like baking tar and car exhaust, and the cigarettes the workers at Target and Marshalls and the Pancake Barn around the corner would sneak out the back doors to smoke. A humid breeze lifted my hair off my neck. Thunder rumbled in the distance; heat lightning crackled in the sky. I hoped it wouldn’t rain—the last time there was a storm, Frank and I had woken up to puddles in the basement and blistered paint on the ceilings, and I’d spent all morning running around the house with empty plastic containers, putting them under the leaks so the floors wouldn’t be ruined, too.

“Did you ever think about going to college?” Gabe asked.

I shook my head, glad that he couldn’t see me blushing in the dark. It was like asking “Did you ever think about going to the moon?” I hadn’t been a great student, and, by the time high school was over, I’d been so in love that the only thing I’d wanted to be was Frank’s wife. That was what the women I knew did—they got married and got jobs you didn’t need a degree to have, and they worked in between children, or when their husbands couldn’t, or didn’t. The only reason my sister had been any different was that she’d been too fat and too unpleasant for any boy to want her.

“You should think about it,” Gabe said. “You’re smart. And there’s online classes.”

This was something I’d considered. I couldn’t imagine going to college: getting dressed, driving my car to the city, sitting in a
lecture hall with all those young girls and boys—but I could do things online. I did things online already: shopping, reading the news and gossip websites, playing games on Facebook, downloading coupons, and, lately, looking things up, articles Gabe had mentioned or reviews of the books he’d given me or words he’d used that I didn’t know. He’d always tell me a definition, but it embarrassed him, so I’d started to just pretend that I knew what all his big words meant, and write them down so I could look them up later:
Modified. Discordant. Ethereal.

“How do you take a class online?” I asked, and he started to tell me. He had a book,
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,
in one hand and was gesturing with the other, his face excited beneath the glow of the streetlamp. He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, a receipt from the soda and three slices of pizza he’d bought at the snack bar for lunch, and was writing down the address of Temple’s website. That was when Frank pulled up to the curb. His mother had stopped by after Bible study, and he’d gotten her to stay with the kids so he could come take me home.

I don’t know what he saw, or what he thought he saw. Gabe and I weren’t doing anything but talking, me in old jeans and sneakers and a no-color cotton top with my pinny balled up in my purse, not touching at all . . . but I could tell from the way Frank’s jaw bunched up that he must have imagined seeing something.

He didn’t say a word after I climbed into the passenger’s seat, but his hands were tight on the wheel and his back was perfectly straight, not even touching the seat. I remembered after the first time we’d had sex, lying with my head against his chest, breathing in the smell of his skin, feeling completely content. He’d looked at me from under his long lashes, and I thought he’d tell me that he loved me. Instead, he’d said, in a casual, almost neutral voice, “You weren’t a virgin.”

I’d set one hand on his chest and pushed myself up. “What?”
I asked him. “Why do you ask? Is it . . . do you think that’s bad?” He’d waited a moment before answering, “It is what it is.” That was all the discussion we’d ever had on the matter, but I thought I could hear what he hadn’t said: that I’d had other boys while he’d been a virgin; that I’d been the one who’d unzipped his pants and I’d been the one with the condoms.

That night, with the Target parking lot getting smaller in the truck’s rearview mirror and Frank’s eyes fixed on the road, I knew better than to try to explain myself. Anything I said would only make me sound guilty, and I had nothing to be guilty about. I pressed my lips together, biting back the angry words I imagined:
Yes! Yes! It’s exactly what you think! Probably what you’ve been thinking all along!

Frank never said a word about it, not on the ride home, not that night or after. At work the next day, Gabe was friendly, like always, but I was careful not to borrow any more of his books or taste any more of his food, and to make sure that the next time I went to the bus stop, I went alone. I didn’t know whether he’d meant anything more than just friendliness, whether he liked me that way. It hardly seemed possible. He was a college boy, soon to be a graduate student, and I was married and a mother of two. In my jeans and work sneakers, with my hair in a careless pony-tail, with not a lick of makeup on my face, heavier than I wanted to be after the babies and years of nibbling chicken nuggets and goldfish crackers off Frank Junior’s plate, I was hardly what the kids called a MILF. But maybe, I thought, remembering the way his face came alive when he was talking about a book he liked, the way his eyes lit up and his hands moved in the air. Maybe Gabe really did think of me that way. Maybe, in another world, we could have been boyfriend and girlfriend.

I got my paycheck on Tuesday, five days after Frank had seen Gabe and I waiting together at the bus stop. That night Frank said, “I think we’ll be okay for the rest of the summer.” I told
him that that would be fine, and gave my notice over the phone the next morning. “We’re sorry to lose you,” my supervisor said, and sounded like she meant it . . . and that was that. Why go looking for trouble, with a little boy and a new baby at home, and a husband who loved me?

I heard the music that told me
Sesame Street
was ending, and I turned away from my computer, looking at Spencer, still cross-legged on the floor, one hand lifting pretzels into his crumb-ringed mouth, his eyes wide, gazing at the screen. The couch cushions were shiny in their centers, the curtains dingy in the sunlight, the screen of the TV set streaked with fingerprints, even though I’d Windexed it the night before.
Please, God,
I thought.
Please, let some woman pick me.
Then I got up, lifted my little boy in my arms, and carried him to the kitchen, where he could play with the pots and pans while I cleaned, and dreamed.

W
hen I thought of the words
private investigator,
a certain image came to mind—a rumpled, world-weary man in a suit and a fedora, feet on a scarred wooden desk, in an office wreathed in cigarette smoke. I pictured a name in gold leaf on a frosted-glass door, a heavy glass ashtray, a man who’d identify women—
dames
—exclusively by their hair color:
The brunette. The redhead. The blonde.

My detective was different. I’d found her by Googling Manhattan private detectives who specialized in what they called “marital matters,” reading online reviews. It made me feel like I was taking a baby step out of my dutiful life—the tasteful, classic clothes, the art history degree, the job as a junior appraiser at Kohler’s, an auction house that was less well known (and, its loyalists boasted, even more exclusive) than Christie’s or Sotheby’s. My life had been long on ease and comfort, filled with fancy vacations, many of them spent at Caribbean resorts while my father paced the beach, barking into his cell phone and looking for the best reception.

When my appointment finally arrived, I was, perhaps, more excited than I should have been, even though the private investigator’s office was on the thirtieth floor of a featureless highrise
in midtown, which put my dreams of gold leaf and pebbled glass to rest. The office had a small
NO SMOKING
plaque by the front door and just two last names—
KLEIN
and
SEGAL
, in sans serif capital letters—beside it. The waiting room could have belonged to any dentist or doctor or therapist, with pale-brown couches and beige carpet, a glass-and-iron coffee table stacked with magazines—
Newsweek
and
Time,
along with the week’s tabloids—and a water cooler that let out the occasional burble in the corner. I gave the receptionist my name, sat down on the couch, my legs, in sheer hose, crossed at the ankle, and pinched the pleats of my skirt between my thumb and forefinger, making sure each one was smooth.

Church lady!
a guy in college had called me one night when I’d allowed my roommates to coax me out of the room and to a party in a neighboring dorm. It was true that I dressed far more conservatively than most of my classmates: after a lifetime in the kilts and knee socks of my Upper East Side all-girls’ school, I’d never felt like myself in pants. Besides, I had narrow shoulders and tended to carry my weight in my hips and thighs, so jeans gave me the appearance of a bowling pin . . . and after seeing my mother traipsing around in belly-baring yoga pants and lowwaisted double-dyed skinny jeans, I’d only wanted to cling to my skirts even more tightly. The summer before my senior year of high school, when I’d been choosing colleges, I’d actually checked to see if there was such a thing as a non-military school that had uniforms. If I could have found such a place, I would have happily attended.

“It’ll be fun!” my roommate, Vanessa, had told me, slipping into her own tight low-riding jeans and the inevitable silk tank top, with a down coat on top, because it was January and freezing. I let her drag me along, in my skirt and tights, my sweater set and my loafers, even though I truly didn’t see the
point of parties. If I wanted to be hot and uncomfortable in the presence of drunk people yelling at one another, it would be easy enough to arrange those conditions, but why would I ever want to?

In the dorm room, I’d stood in the corner next to the stereo speakers, sneaking glances at my watch and wondering how soon I could feign a headache and get back to my room. There was a girl I recognized from my art history seminar lying on her back on one of the desks, giggling as a boy poured tequila into her navel, then bent down to slurp it out. Maybe it was supposed to be sexy, but all I could think was
germs!
and
disease!
and
belly-button lint!
At another desk, a half dozen of my classmates stood in front of a computer, watching porn. That was a big thing at Vassar: girls watching dirty movies with their boyfriends to show that they were progressive and evolved. I turned away as, onscreen, a naked man with a six-pack and tribal tattoos pulled his penis out of the woman he’d been hunched over and smacked it, over and over, into her cheeks.

I must have been making a face, because when I looked up, a guy I didn’t know was staring at me.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

He pointed. “Church lady!” he hollered. His friends started laughing, and then the girl with tequila all over her belly sat up and started laughing, too. Even after the guy who’d first said it had wandered away, probably to poop into the host’s rice cooker, then post a picture on Facebook, people were still saying it and laughing. Of course, Vanessa had overheard, and she’d hustled me over to the porn computer so she could show me YouTube videos of a man dressed as a woman with a sour face and a blue tweed suit and eyeglasses on a chain acting offended about everything. The guy had undoubtedly meant it as a devastating insult. I was not insulted. Given a choice between being a church
lady or one of my female classmates who’d have to wake up the next morning wondering whether her nipples were now online, I’d take the church lady every time.

“Bettina Croft?”

I got to my feet. A woman was standing in the doorway of an office. Through the open door I could see bright art on the walls, and a dozen framed photographs on a side table. The woman had a friendly-looking face, brown hair in a ponytail, and a white short-sleeved T-shirt on top of a pair of loose-fitting cropped linen pants the color of raspberries. She wore flip-flops and a necklace of brightly colored glass beads as her only accessory. “Pleasure to meet you,” she said, shaking my hand and leading me inside. “Now. Before we get started, one quick question, and you have to tell me the truth,” she said, after I’d taken the chair across from her desk and settled my purse beside me. “Are these pajamas?” She stood, pointing at her pants. I stared.

“Excuse me?”

“I know you’re not here to talk about my pants,” she said. “We’ll get started in a sec. It’s just, I’m so distracted! I bought them—it was this ungodly hot day, and everything was at the dry cleaner’s, so I was wearing a wool skirt, and I thought I was going to melt, so I just ran in and grabbed them off the rack. They’re really comfortable, and I liked them so much I went online to buy another pair, and they were listed under ‘loungewear’ instead of pants, and I’m worried that I’m actually out in public in my PJs.” She made a face. “If that’s true, my partner will kill me. Janie’s
stylish,
” she said. “She finds me very frustrating.”