Envy (26 page)

26

Will drops his briefcase on the table by the front door. “Hey,” he says to Carole, who's sitting on the couch, her arms folded, the current issue of Yoga Journal in her lap. At the sound of his voice, she uncrosses her arms, picks up the magazine, and starts flipping through it.

Will glances up the stairs toward their daughter's room. “Where's Sam?” he asks. He doesn't know that he's ever seen Carole take the time to sit and read a magazine before their daughter was in bed.

“Watching a movie.”

“Upstairs?”

Carole nods, but she doesn't look up.

“She okay?”

“Why wouldn't she be?”

“I don't know. She doesn't usually watch TV on a weeknight. I thought maybe she wasn't feeling well or something.”

“She's fine.” Carole comes to the end of the magazine and then starts again at the beginning, licking her index finger and using it to flick past the pages, not so fast that she doesn't quickly scan each one.

“What are you doing, Carole?” Will asks her.

“This is what I hate about
Yoga Journal,
” she says. She sounds so fed up, it's as if she's at last voicing a serious complaint of many years' standing. “Every issue, every single issue, there's something on the cover that you can't find inside. Look.” She thrusts the magazine at Will, talking faster than usual. “Seven Steps for Turning Bad Habits into Good Ones.” She opens the magazine to the table of contents. “Look. Just look. Do you see ‘Seven Steps for Turning Bad Habits into Good Ones'? No. No you do not. That's because it's not there. Page by page, I've gone through the entire issue, trying to find anything that might fit the description—‘seven steps for turning bad into good'—and there's nothing. Not one paragraph.” She slaps the magazine down on the coffee table. Will sits carefully in the chair opposite the couch.

“You don't have any bad habits, Carole.”

“That is not the point. The point is—”

“Carole?” he interrupts.

“What?”

“Is something going on?”

“You tell me,” she says. He glances upstairs.

“How long's the DVD going to last?” he asks.

“What?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Yes, I guess you do.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

She closes her eyes as if there's no expression, no other gesture that could possibly convey her exasperation. “Will—”

“Wait. There's something I have to tell you, Carole. I had lunch with my father and—”

“Will, I don't want to talk about anything until you listen to—”

He holds up one hand, as if directing a driver to stop. It's the kind of communication—wordless, and, in her opinion, appropriate only for animal trainers or airport ground crews—that has in the past provoked her to walk out on an argument. She makes a little huff of protest.

“We have to talk now,” he says. “If we don't . . . if I don't say this now . . .” He shakes his head.

“What is it?”

Will takes a deep breath. “How . . .” He takes another breath. “Carole?” he says, after allowing the silence to grow uncomfortable.

“I've, uh . . . something bad's happened. My fault. I did something stupid, and then I made it even worse. Not on purpose. I had lunch with my father. I . . . God, I'm telling this all backwards. I'm trying to go in the right order, but it's not—it's hard to make sense of. I asked him why Mitch left when he did, why he skipped out before the wedding. I had . . . I'd always suspected there was something. Why didn't you tell me, Carole?”

She takes her hands from her face but she doesn't look at him. “I . . . I don't know,” she says. “We . . . I . . . I didn't plan to keep it a secret.”

“But you did. You kept it a secret for fifteen years. And now, now I've done something terrible. And it's all related, it's all tangled up in the same . . .” Will trails off, watching Carole shake her head, her eyes downcast.

“After he . . . after Mitch . . . there wasn't any way to get back to how it was before,” she says. “How I was. Because it was one of those things that—it just divided everything. Me. It divided me into before and after. And how could I change that?” She looks up at him, speaking faster than usual, and more loudly; her voice has lost its characteristic calm. “I mean from the outside would anyone even think I was raped? It was all messed up. Everything was. The person who I, who . . . the, the person was someone I invited into our room. And now there was this ugly, this dirty thing that would play out in front of everyone we knew, everyone we cared about. Our families, people from work, guests from out of town, friends from college. It would . . . I was afraid it would always be, ‘Oh, you remember them, don't you? She's the one who was raped, or, or tricked, or . . . or whatever it was, by the groom's twin brother.' ” Suddenly Carole is on her feet, pacing and waving her arms as she speaks. Will didn't even see her get up from where she was sitting; she moved that fast.

“I wanted to save face. Or I guess what I mean is, I didn't want to lose face. I was
scared,
Will. And I tried to tell you. Later, I did. But whenever I mentioned Mitch, you changed the subject. You were . . . I felt like you were avoiding the topic. So, I quit. I quit trying so—”

“No!” Will says. “I have no memory, none, of your trying to tell me anything.”

“But I did. And how it turned out—that wasn't calculated. I didn't intend for you to not ever know. Maybe . . . maybe that was what your father wanted. Or maybe it was what they both—your mom and your dad—wanted. Or what I thought they'd want. Or vice versa, what they thought I would. I mean, Jesus, Will, you don't know how many times I've gone over this. Anyway, they're all after the fact, these interpretations. I can't remember what I was thinking then, that night, and that's because I wasn't thinking anything. Except I wanted us to get married and everything to be okay.” She looks at Will, waiting for him to speak, but he says nothing, and she goes on.

“I didn't have any idea of how . . . how emotionally costly it would become. That wasn't something I even considered in the moment— why would I?—I never planned to keep it a secret. Not indefinitely. But the longer I didn't tell you, the more difficult it got. Once I'd said nothing for a day, since it was our wedding day, and then for all of our honeymoon—because I didn't want to wreck that. It was, you know, our
honeymoon,
and I wanted to protect it, that little bubble of time. And after, when we were back home, it just got . . . it got harder and harder to imagine myself introducing the topic. We'd be apart from each other all day, both of us working, and I'd have scripted a dialogue in my head, rehearse how I was going to begin it, but whenever the chance presented itself, I . . . I didn't. It got to be as if it never happened. Sometimes it seemed so unreal, it was as if it had been a sort of, oh, I don't know, some overwrought fantasy about myself and a famous person, someone who doesn't even exist outside the media. The way a teenager might dream about having a date with Brad Pitt or someone. Since that's what Mitch had become, a person who isn't even real. Not anymore, not for us.”

She looks at Will, who leans forward, his elbows on his knees, considering this idea: Mitch's transformation from flesh to fantasy. He tries to imagine the comforts, and the cost, of what would amount to a kind of amputation, the erasure of a distempered part of himself, a version of himself he'd be better off without. Wouldn't the loss leave him desolate, prey to the psychic equivalent of a ghost limb—pain where there is nothing? Pain generated by nothingness. Has this happened already? Has Mitch been removed? Excised?

As if the words
bubble of time
were a tranquilizing spell, Will finds that he has panned back from the argument. Sees himself and Carole grow smaller and smaller, watches their living room shrink to the size of a shoe box. As he ascends, he listens to something like a voice-over inside his own head. A voice too refined to ever—even in extremis— grow loud or shrill, a voice with Alistair Cooke's British accent, the measured tone of one of his PBS program introductions, it talks to Will, making reasonable suggestions like “Let's look at the big picture, Will. Take the long view.”

His arrival on this Zen peak, a height to which he's aspired but never even come close to attaining, with its atmosphere too thin to allow the waste of oxygen on untamed emotion, leaves him not only detached but with a clear head. It's as if, after an eternity of fiddling, he's at last managed to tune in his own thoughts without the interference of static or the indistinct mumbling of other channels.

“The other thing is,” he hears Carole say, “do you remember how fast we got pregnant? How happy we were? I was happy and you were, too, and I . . . I asked myself, why tell you now? For what?” She frowns, shakes her head.

Will sees movement on the stairs. “Samantha!” he says to alert her mother. Carole turns around.

“Hello, sweetheart.” There is nothing in her voice to suggest the two of them might be involved in a conversation of any importance. “You must be ready for dinner, no?”

Sam doesn't answer. She stands in the middle of the staircase, looking from her father to her mother and then back. “The movie's over,” she says, finally.

“How about another?” Will offers, and she shakes her head.

“I'm not allowed.”

“Oh, we can break the rules. Every once in a while we can.”

“No,” she says, “we can't.”

“Aren't you hungry?” Carole asks.

“It could be anything,” Will says, “anything you want. It could be ice cream.” Sam looks at him, at first with suspicion and then with a peculiarly grown-up expression, a miniature rendition of her mother's men-just-don't-get-it look, one delicate eyebrow raised, her mouth puckered in a wry, little twist. She turns to her mother.

“The thing is,” Carole says, “Daddy and I are talking. We have something we need to figure out and—”

“What? What do you?”

“It's not . . . it's something . . .”

“Is it money?”

No, Will is about to say, but then he reconsiders—if ever an occasion excused a white lie, this would be it. “It is, Sam,” he tells her. “It is about money.”

“Grilled cheese?” Carole asks. “Or how about an omelet? There are apples from the green market, and I'll slice them the way you like.” Samantha nods and pushes her hair behind her ears as she follows her mother to the kitchen, showing Will the pale, almost transparent skin of her temple.

“How do you know?” he asks Carole as soon as Samantha has eaten and gone back upstairs. “How can you be sure Luke isn't— wasn't—Mitch's child instead of mine? Because I do remember, and it was fast. Barely nine months from the wedding.”

Carole is shaking her head before he stops talking. “I know,” she says, “I know because he . . . because I made him pull out before it got to that point.”

“You—”

“You don't think he could have—you can't think I wouldn't have known. That I didn't guess who it was. I knew right away it wasn't you. It just . . . I just didn't believe it. Myself. It took me that minute to convince myself that I wasn't crazy, that it really was him instead of you.”

Will nods slowly. “My dad had it wrong, then. He thought it was the same as with the others. That Mitch didn't pull off the mask until the end, after . . . that he didn't reveal himself until it was done.”

“The same as with . . . what others? What are you talking about?”

“It wasn't the only time. He'd done it before, with other girls.” Will watches Carole's expression.

“Before? He did it with other girls you . . . girls you knew before?” She's speaking with her face in her hands, the way someone might cradle an aching jaw.

“Yes. That's the part that's . . . that's how this is connected to the . . . to the mess I've made. I saw a woman, an old girlfriend, at the reunion and . . .” He trails off. The two of them watch each other from across the coffee table.

“Elizabeth?” Carole says, finally.

“How did you know?”

“There's a message. On the machine.” Will raises his eyebrows. “You'd better just listen,” she says, and he gets up, goes to the kitchen phone.

“Hey there, Dr. Moreland,” drawls a familiar voice. “It's Jennifer. I'm, like, looking at a lab report. Because guess what? As it happened, I found this little hair of yours glued to my thigh with spooge. So I guess we, like, traded—a long one of mine for a short, curly one of yours. And, so, hey, I'm interested in sharing my news with you if you're, like, interested enough to call me back. Or even if you aren't.” The machine announces the time and date of the call, then clicks off.

“Shit,” Will says. That Jennifer has left such a message for his wife to hear is a surprisingly destructive act, even from her. He hits the play button and listens to the message once more.

“This isn't from today, Carole. It's from . . . it says it's from Tuesday. Last Tuesday, when I was out of town.” He comes back to the living room. “Unless the date thing's screwed up?”

“No,” Carole says, her face expressionless.

“So . . .” Will shakes his head. “You've . . . you heard this before? Before today?”

“No. You know I always fast-forward through the ones from your patients. But, the . . . the person who left that, that message, Jennifer, her mother called today, just before you got home. After I talked to her, I remembered that before I skipped past one message, I'd heard someone identify herself as Jennifer.” It isn't only her face. Carole's voice, too, is without affect.

“Elizabeth?” he says. “Elizabeth called here?”