Envy (27 page)

“She asked me to tell you something.”

“What is it?” Will says when she doesn't continue.

“I . . . I want to make sure I get it right.” Like a student trying to summon a lesson committed to memory, Carole closes her eyes while she speaks. “A DNA analysis that Elizabeth's husband, Paul somebody, insisted be made, confirmed that Jennifer is not your child. Apparently, Jennifer told him—Paul—about the . . . about whatever's going on among you three, and he was angry enough to force the issue. One that Elizabeth considers is now closed, never to be reopened. Jennifer is Paul's biological and legal daughter. If you attempt to contact Elizabeth or any member of her family, any colleague or associate, any friend or acquaintance, ‘even the fucking paper boy'—that's a direct quote—you'll be in violation of the restraining order she's filing tomorrow.” Carole opens her eyes.

“That's it?” Will says. “That's all she said?” He's so flooded with relief he starts to laugh, just for a moment. The look on Carole's face sobers him up. She's furious, her teeth clenched so tightly that a band of muscle stands out in her cheek. “See, I thought . . . I wasn't laughing because anything was funny. For a month, almost, I've thought she, Jennifer, I thought she—”

“You slept with this person. You had sex with her.”

Will sits down; then he stands back up, puts his hands in his pockets. “Yes,” he says.

“She's . . . she's a patient?”

“No,” he says. “Was. She was before.”

“Before what? Before you fucked her!” Will doesn't answer. “Why!” she says. “Why!”

“Why?”

“All right, how? How could you!”

“I—”

Abruptly, Carole's voice has acquired an edge. “I want a way to understand.”

“I'm sorry. You remember I told you about the girl, the one who came on to me?”

“I think you may have understated the case,” Carole says, “in that you told me she kissed you.” The venom in her voice more than compensates for whatever expression her face lacks.

“She did,” he says. “And then I did what I said I was going to. I told her we couldn't continue working together and referred her to another therapist. But she came back. Came to the office, refused to leave. Told me she was sorry and carried on. She even cried, or I thought she did. Anyway, I believed her. I believed her enough to let down my guard. I turned my back for a minute—just to disengage while I tried to come up with a way to convince her to leave without exacerbating the whole mess—and when I turned back around she'd taken all her clothes off. Threatened to, well, to make it appear as if I'd tried to rape her unless I . . .”

“Unless you?”

“Complied.”

“Complied.”

“Yes. With her intention to have intercourse with me.”

“Come on! Am I supposed to believe that—”

“Yes! You are. Because she did. And as it turns out, she was looking for a . . . for revenge.”

“Revenge! For what! Revenge for what!”

“I . . . it started when I ran into Elizabeth at the reunion.” Will looks away and then back at his wife. “The fact is, when we broke up, Elizabeth was pregnant, and I . . . I wondered was there a chance of her—the daughter—being my biological child. We talked. I said something that offended Elizabeth. I didn't mean it the way she took it—I'm not even sure exactly how she took it, other than badly. Whatever she thought, I just wanted to know, not to interfere. As soon as I read her page in the reunion book and saw the date of her daughter's birth, I . . . I needed to get a fix on it. Needed to know one way or the other. So I asked would she give me a hair sample, so I could have it tested.”

“You wanted proof?” Carole says.

“Yes. Something definitive. Otherwise, it would be open-ended. Alive. I wanted to put it to rest.”

“But how? How could you if she turned out to be yours?”

“I don't know. I'd have to deal with it, obviously. But it wouldn't be as—I don't think it would be as disturbing as not knowing. Anyway, the conversation got combative. I didn't back down; she got more and more defensive. Clearly, she imagined I was going to . . . to intrude on her life. Or Jennifer's. She even said I was looking for a surrogate for Luke. But, honestly, I don't think that was my intent. Not even unconsciously. I've thought about this a lot. Maybe if the child had been a boy, but I can't see myself drawing an equation—I just don't think that was what I wanted.”

“Well, what did you want?”

“I don't know. I'm not sure. It was a mistake to press her, Carole, and I apologize. I was . . . I don't know what I was. Lonely, I guess— at loose ends. And she . . . she went ballistic. Must have then misrepresented my request to Jennifer. Characterizing me as . . . as an asshole, evidently. And Jennifer, who is, well, she probably tends to sexualize every transaction, but in this case she must have determined to possess me in return. In response to Elizabeth's saying I had possessive feelings for her. Jennifer, I mean. Possess me sexually.” Carole stares at him, arms crossed, mouth closed. “And I, uh, I couldn't . . . didn't . . . stop it. She didn't tell me who she was until it was over.”

“Why!” Carole says. “Why! Why didn't you!”

“I don't know,” he says. “After she'd refused to put her clothes back on and leave, I just was . . . I don't know what I was. Struck dumb, basically.”

“But not unaffected.”

“Not unaffected?”

“As in not unable to perform. I mean, come on, Will, it's not as if a woman can sexually . . . can sexually engage a man without a certain degree of . . . cooperation. A physical willingness.”

“Yes. You're—well, you're right. That's true. But that isn't within my conscious moral control. It's not something I can decide whether or not to do.”

“So this would be a case of the, the flesh being weak? Is that what you're saying?”

“I guess that's one way to put it.”

“Well, do you have anything to say about that?”

“No.”

“No?”

“What can I say, Carole? I'm sorry. I'm sorry I was aroused. I didn't do it on purpose.”

“Fine. Fine. Great. Swell. That makes it all okay, right? Will can't help it if he has a hard-on, can he?” she says to the wall, the chair, an invisible witness or referee. “Do I get to ask why? Why did you, or a part of you, want to have sex with her?”

“Come on, Carole.”

“Why you wanted it enough that you didn't manage to, to control your physical response?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know.”

“No.”

“Well, think of something! I think you owe me the courtesy of trying to explain, don't you?”

“Well, she was . . . she was attractive. Physically. I said so. She elicited a physical response.”

“It's not as if you're deprived at home.”

“No.” Will shakes his head. “Well, I am. I am in that I never get to make love to someone with a face. Leaving me, what, well, alone, I guess.”

“Alone? You? What about me?”

“What about you? Are you lonely, Carole? Because how would I know? You're not exactly a person with her heart on her—”

“Will, you're so involved with, with Luke that—”

“That's too easy! You're projecting your feelings onto me. I don't think I'm any more involved with him than you are.”

“He can't . . . Luke can't . . .” Carole shakes her head. “He can't be the end of every argument. He can't be the cause of every problem we have.”

“Of course he can't! He isn't. In fact, it's become suddenly clear that from the beginning—long before the accident—my brother was—”

“I never didn't forgive you, Will, for the accident. I forgave you from the beginning. No—that's not right. Forgiving you would imply I'd weighed what had happened and decided you weren't—”

“Carole, you can't just have been automatically saintly. No one is. You've repress—”

“I never blamed you! And I am so sick of this stupid, stupid argument. I always thought of it, and I still do think of it, as something that happened to us. Both of us. All of us.”

“So why? Why then? You do have to admit something happened, Carole, something inside you. It wasn't me who, who . . . our sex life wasn't the same as it had been. Right away, it wasn't. The very first time we made love after Luke drowned, it was different. And you were the one who made it different.”

Carole opens her mouth, and he sees a tremor in her chin and her bottom lip. “It's not you,” she says. “If the accident is anyone's fault, it's mine. Not yours.
Mine.
” She says the word with one hand splayed over her breastbone.

Will throws his hands up over his head. “Yours! How is that possible? What kind of upside-down thinking could lead you to believe any of it was your fault?” Carole looks away, her lips compressed into a tight line. “What?” he says. “What!”

She gives up trying to stop the tears. “I can't make myself . . . I know this sounds like what you'd call estrogen logic, but I . . . I can't help feeling that it was, it had to have been a kind of . . . of correction. A realignment. Because of me.”

“What are you talking about! I have no idea what you're talking about!”

“Luke was”—her voice catches—“he was perfect, he was good. He was a . . . there was nothing wrong about him. And I'm . . . I was afraid I was being corrected. Punished for, for—”

“For Mitch?” he says. “For my brother's . . . out of some kind of, of cosmic readjustment?”

Carole nods as if what Will said does in fact add up.

“And what about Luke? What about our little boy? In this line of reasoning, why should it be Luke who pays for the realignment?” Will stops pacing to look at Carole. “I mean, unless you have a whole different moral scale for yourself. Unless the rest of us—me, Sam, your friends, your clients and their, their well-meaning, unenlightened parents—unless we all get measured with the mini moral yardstick, the one for regular mortals and their mini virtues and vices. Is that why you forgive me, Carole? Or why forgiving or not forgiving isn't even an issue for you? Because you're on a different plane, a whole other body of water, sailing along smoothly, no waves, no capsizing?”

He stops ranting when he notices the look on Carole's face. An outrage he's never seen before—it's blanched her cheeks and flared her nostrils, so narrowed her usually round eyes that, were he to see this face outside its context, he might not identify it as belonging to anyone he knows. He's so surprised, so intent on her expression, that he doesn't even register that she's seized something from the coffee table, doesn't see her hurl it at his head. Maybe she should have been the one who coached Little League, he thinks absurdly as he stumbles back and trips over his own feet. Then he's on the floor, looking at her through a foggy pink veil.

“Oh God, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Will. I think I . . . I split open your, your, right above your eyebrow.” She has a wad of paper towels and is pressing them to his head. “I think it needs stitches.”

“Here,” he says. Will uses his own hand to hold the paper towels against his head, pressing harder than she was willing to, to try to stop the bleeding. As he gets to his feet, he sees what it was that hit him, the jar of peanut butter he left on the coffee table when he was talking on the phone with his father, asking him if he was okay with changing their lunch date, seeing each other a week earlier than usual. While talking he'd wandered away from the kitchen, forgotten he was in the middle of making a sandwich. The jar is lying label up, intact. After the Fall is the name of the brand Carole buys, and this strikes him as funny, enough that he starts to laugh.

“Maybe you should start buying Skippy,” he says when he can speak, “in the nice plastic jar. Instead of that organic stuff. Then the next time you throw it at me, this won't happen.” He's still laughing, he can't help it.

“Shit,” she says. “Sorry, sorry, I'm sorry. I'm going to pull the car around. Sam!” she yells. “Samantha! Do you think you can go up and get her, Will?”

27

The emergency room is its usual purgatory. Will tries not to think of what Samantha might be catching from the little boy next to her, the two of them staring at the overhead TV on the other side of the waiting area, the one tuned to Cartoon Network. Each time the child exhales, a bubble of mucus extrudes from one nostril. He inhales, the bubble deflates, disappears, then reemerges. What it never does is pop.

“I wish you'd thrown it harder,” he says; “then I could have been triaged to the front of the line.”

“Hmnhh,” Carole answers. CNN is on and Will strains to see the time in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, but it's too small to read from where he's sitting. It must be at least midnight, though, because this is the third time they've seen the same tape feed of a distraught Middle Eastern woman holding a man's photograph up to the camera.

“Carole?” Will says. She yawns.

“What is it?” She sits up straight to stretch her arms over her head.

“Marry me?”

He still can't read the time at the bottom of the TV screen, but he can see the digits change before she answers. “I haven't divorced you yet,” she says.

Perhaps this is a function of the length of the pause, but Will can't tell whether or not she's being serious. He can't see her face without getting up and walking around in front of her.
You're not serious, are you?
He tries out the question in his head.

“How long do you think it'll take to go through?” he tries instead. Both of them are looking up at the screen rather than at each other.

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“Whether it's no-contest or nobody's fault or whatever they call it.”

“Fault,” Will says. “Fault's tricky.”

“Very.” Carole retrieves a tissue from her purse and blows her nose.

“You'll think this is ridiculous, but I tend to make pie graphs when I'm assigning responsibility.” Will switches the hand holding the paper towels to his head from right to left. “In this case, my brother would get the biggest slice, but then I'd get some, too, and my parents. Jennifer. Maybe Elizabeth. Then there's you.”

“Which case?”

“The thing with Jennifer.”

“Why am I in there?”

“Because anything that has to do with me and sex automatically involves you.”

“Wouldn't there have to be more than one pie?” Carole says after a minute. “One labeled Mitch, the other Jennifer?”

“There could be three. Mitch, Jennifer, and Luke. Drawn on transparencies, so they could be superimposed one over another.”

She shakes her head. “Too complicated. Everyone—Mitch, Jennifer, Luke—they're all both pies and slices in other pies.”

“Are they?”

“Of course. Take Luke, his drowning I mean. He's a pie, with responsibility apportioned among you, for sailing the boat; Luke himself, for not leaving his vest buckled; me, for renting the house on the lake; my friend, the one who gave me the joint, just in case you were a little hungover, less focused—although I never agreed with you about that. I mean, I didn't notice anything. Then there's the boat-rental company, for not, I don't know, issuing warnings, or whatever; the sailing instructor, for not stressing the importance of paying attention all the time; the weather, for being so beautiful; and so on. I mean you can go on slicing smaller and smaller pieces of causation. And aside from being a pie, Luke would also be in the Jennifer pie, if it's true that by drowning he left you vulnerable to involvement with . . .” She trails off.

“It's funny,” Will says. “How much of my time is dedicated to helping other people to stop assessing themselves, or situations in which they find themselves, in terms of blame. Judgment. Who did what, and who said what, and what it might mean as far as his or her culpability in the given conflict.”

“But?”

“But I do it to myself. To us. I can't let go of the idea that I can figure things out.”

“With pie graphs.”

“I said it was ridiculous.”

Carole looks at his forehead. “Maybe I should go to the restroom for more paper towels.”

“No, don't.”

“But it's seeping through.”

“It doesn't matter. Stay here. Talk to me.”

Carole leans her head against his shoulder. “You were sort of right about the different moral yardsticks,” she says. “Except you made it sound so smug, and I don't think I am, really. Saying I have two standards—one for me and one for everyone else—it could just as easily be that I give other people the benefit of the doubt, which I don't do for myself.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. Maybe because I'm in my own head. With other people I have to correct for not knowing their private experience. As in that old supposedly Native American proverb, the one about having to walk in someone else's moccasins.”

The triage nurse comes to the ER door. “Hernandez!” she calls. She crosses the name from the list on the clipboard resting on the counter of the locked service window. Will sees that Samantha has fallen asleep, her legs stretched across the seat where the little boy had been sitting.

“Do we really have to get divorced before I propose?” he asks.

“I guess I might settle for a pre-nup, instead.”

“How much?” he says. She's so deadpan, he can't tell what's a joke and what isn't.

“It wouldn't be about money.”

“What then?”

“Well, first off, you have to skip your thirtieth college reunion. And your thirty-fifth. Fortieth, forty-fifth. I guess if you haven't kicked the bucket by your fiftieth—you'll be how old, seventy-something?—we can maybe negotiate.”

Will holds out his free hand as if to shake hers, but she's not finished.

“You throw out all your ties. Wear only the ones I buy for you.”

“Even the paisley ones?”

“Especially the paisley ones.”

“Is there more?” Will asks, when she doesn't continue.

“A new dishwasher before you buy even one more antique map.

Also, I think I really do want cable so I can begin my career as a TV watcher. I'm not giving up yoga, but I want to pursue some vacuous activities, practice wasting time. I must be the only person in New York who never saw even one episode of
Sex and the City.
I might even start, I don't know, drinking a glass of wine or two on weekends.”

Will nods. “Is that it?”

She shakes her head.

“Well?”

“No more birth control.”

Will looks at her. He says nothing, preoccupied with feeling how it feels, their eyes on each other's. Reminded of the old childhood game: Who'll be the first to blink or laugh? Who will turn away?

The idea of Carole pregnant doesn't summon images of a new baby so much as it does a series of fragments, like flash cards, pictures of Luke mostly, Luke before he could talk. Grabbing the cat's tail and laughing when she hissed. Shoving his pacifier into Will's mouth. The way he slept on his stomach, knees drawn under, butt in the air. “I can't,” Will says, finally. “I don't think I can do it again.”

Carole pulls up one corner of the wad of paper towels to look at the gash. “What if I can't stand not to?”

“I don't know. Is it a deal breaker?”

“Maybe.”

He takes her hand in his. “I'm . . .”

“What if I can't stand not to?” she asks him again, before he can figure out what he's trying to say.

“Moreland,” the triage nurse announces from the door. Will stands up.

“Aren't you coming with me?” he asks.

“Just let me grab Sam.” Carole manages to gather their daughter into her arms without waking her. Her legs dangle down as far as her mother's knees. “Ugh,” Carole says. “I never get why it is that kids feel heavier when they're asleep.”

They follow the nurse into a small examination room, where she takes his blood pressure and his temperature before saturating the wad of paper towels with hydrogen peroxide in order to peel them away from his forehead. As soon as it's uncovered, the gash opens and begins bleeding again. “Whoa,” she says, “what happened here?”

“I threw something at his head.”

“I bumped it on the mantel.”

They speak at the same instant, and the nurse looks back and forth between them, her plucked eyebrows raised.

“It was a joke,” Will says.

“Domestic violence is not something we find funny here in the emergency room.”

“I'm sorry,” Carole says. “I get a little punchy when I'm tired.” The nurse frowns and turns to Will. “Well,” she says, “you picked a good night for a facial. Dr. Cunningham came on at eleven.” She tears the paper from around a pad of sterile gauze and tells him to hold it against the split flesh, lifting his hand to his forehead. “You don't have to push so hard,” she says.

“A facial?” Carole asks.

“Facial wound.” The nurse stands, and they do, too, Will pulling Carole to her feet when she can't rise under the weight of their sleeping daughter. All of them file down the hall, the nurse, then Will, Carole and Samantha lagging behind. “Eyebrows are tricky. They heal up crooked if they're not sutured just so. Dr. Cunningham's a plastic surgeon.”

She leaves the three of them in an enclosure made by a white curtain hanging from a U-shaped track in the ceiling. Inside are a bed and a chair. On the orange Formica counter are bandages, alcohol preps, and emesis basins. Carole arranges Samantha facedown on the bed to keep the light out of her eyes. There's only the one sheet, tucked around and under the mattress, so she pulls it out and wraps what she can of it around her.

“Wow,” she says, shaking her head. “A good night for a facial.”

“I didn't know it went through my eyebrow.” Will tries to find his reflection in the stainless steel paper-towel dispenser.

“Hello,” someone says, and they both jump, turn around. “Let's take a look.”

“Are you Dr. Cunningham?” Will asks.

“Last time I checked.” He pulls on a pair of gloves and motions for Will to sit in the chair. “Close your eyes,” he says. “Deep. How'd it happen?”

“A jar of peanut butter,” Carole says. “Glass. Kind of heavy.”

“Didn't break?” he asks mildly, not seeming to infer anything from her answer.

“No.”

“Looks clean. Have to trim the dermis. Minimize scarring.” He flips up the magnifying lens he's wearing on his own head. “Back in a sec.”

“A little weird,” Carole whispers to Will after the doctor has left the enclosure, “don't you think?”

“You mean the ponytail? The red clogs? The vampire pallor?”

“His lips are so—he looks like he's wearing lipstick, but I don't think he is, really.” Carole strokes Will's hair back, away from the gash. “I am sorry,” she tells him. “Does it hurt?”

He shakes his head. “It's going to make a distinguished-looking scar. Dangerously sexy. I can see there'll be times I'll have to cover it with a low-brimmed hat to keep you from going wild.” She smiles, but it's not because she thinks what he's said is funny: he can see she's humoring him.

The surgeon returns with a tray of instruments, looks at Samantha sleeping. “Let's go next-door.” He grabs a handful of curtain and pulls it aside.

“Numb you up,” he says to Will after he's settled him under a light so bright that Will can't help but close his eyes, seeing what looks like lightning striking through a red sky, the veins in his eyelids, he guesses. The doctor's latex-sheathed fingers are cool and sticky on his skin, and the antiseptic smell of Betadine jolts Will back to the delivery room: the white flesh at the top of Carole's thighs stained dark orange, the stuff running down into her pubic hair and onto the white sheets.

The doctor covers Will's face with what feels like paper, a disposable cloth, no doubt. There's a hole in the center, though; he can feel air against his skin, cold where the Betadine is evaporating. “Feel a pinch,” the doctor says.

Despite the warning, Will flinches when the needle goes in, and Carole squeezes his hand. “Is it okay if I watch?” she asks, but if the doctor answers, it's with a nod or a gesture, something Will can't see.

“It's not quite as big as I thought,” Carole says, narrating what's going on for him. “Maybe an inch and a half. He's not doing the skin yet. He's stitching the muscle together underneath.”

Will draws a deep breath, so deep that he feels the cloth lift off his mouth when he exhales. “Carole?” He gives her hand a little shake.

“What is it?”

“I'll try.” He waits for her to answer, or even just to squeeze his fingers in return, anxious enough that he forgets to pay attention to the tugging of the sutures.

“Are you . . . do you mean what we were talking about before?” she says at last. He startles at an unexpected ring of metal against metal. The doctor must have dropped an instrument into the tray.

“I'm not . . . I can't promise, but I don't want you to think I'd dismissed the idea. It's just that I—”

“Had to shave some hair,” the doctor says, “so I could see. Don't want a jig in the brow.”

“I didn't think you dismissed it,” Carole says. “I just can't figure out how not to want what I want, you know?”

“I know.” Still holding her hand, Will strokes her knuckles with his thumb. “I know.”

Suddenly, the cloth flies up off his face. “Want to take a look before I put the dressing on?” the doctor says.

“Can I?”

He points to a door across the hall, on it a little blue sign with the outlines of a man, a woman, and a wheelchair.

Will leans over the sink to inspect his face. Now that the two sides are stitched together in a line, the gash is a little anticlimactic, he thinks. He can count at least twenty stitches, but they're tiny, made with very fine nylon thread. He cups his hands under the faucet for a drink of water, aware of a slight throb as he bends his head down. Whatever was in the needle is wearing off.