Every Day (15 page)

He rolls over onto his back, studies the ceiling.

“You’ve got nothing to lose,” I urge.

He grips my arm without looking at me. “But you do.”

“Really.”

“You’ve got a husband and three children.”

“I think my husband has sought refuge elsewhere.”

“Men do that.”

“Wrong again,” I quip, pulling him back to me, hoping to lose myself again to sex.
“People
do that.”

I call Simon after we’ve had some English muffins and coffee. I ask him if he can find a place to stay for a few days so I can come home and see the children. He is calm, almost pleasant. Perhaps fresh out of bed with Kirsten, or maybe still in it with her, having found something to do with the children for a couple of hours. He gives me no argument. “That’s fine,” he says. “Jane will appreciate that. I can’t speak for Isaac.”

I explain that I’ll be arriving this afternoon, that he should make arrangements.

Brief silence. Then, “As you wish.”

Now there’s ice in his voice, and I don’t like the insinuation of it: that what goes around comes around, that I’ll get mine for the disturbances I’ve caused, that our house will burn, the children will turn against me, he’ll win.

I put the phone back in its wall cradle in the small, bright kitchen.

“I’m going home and see my kids.”

He says he’ll accompany me to Mother’s to get Daisy, then take us to the train.

Outside he walks steadily, lightly tapping the pavement with the rubber tip of his cane, out in front of him, like the blind do.

“Do you need that?” I ask.

“I’m not sure.” He directs this out in front of him, as if it’s a cosmic question, not just something a girlfriend has asked him.

“Do you want to get a bus or a cab?”

“I want to walk,” he says.

“Of course.” We take them slowly, the long blocks west to the bus, like tourists. Like lovers.

•   •   •

I ask him to wait downstairs while I go up and get Daisy. He sits on the leather couch in the lobby. Getting on the elevator, I wave nervously. He tips his hat.

Mother says she just can’t bring herself to say hello today, she hopes I’ll understand.

“I just can’t get my mind around some of this, Leigh,” she says. “I packed the diaper bag, but I thought I’d keep some of Daisy’s things here, in the event that you need to come back.”

“Thank you, Ma.”

I’ve got Daisy around me like a monkey. Mother hugs us both.

“I’m glad you’ll be with Jane. Honestly, to look at her yesterday, you’d have thought the world had ended.”

“She thinks it has,” I say.

“Yes,” Mother says, her eyes full. “I guess you know that.”

“You’re a good mother,” I tell her when she hands me a bag of food.

“Yes,” she says, smiling tearfully. “I suppose I am. Now run along.”

I am so glad to have Daisy weighing me down that I wish we had more floors to travel on the elevator ride. When we get off, Fowler is standing right in front of us.

“Let’s have a look,” he says, his cap off, holding out a hand for Daisy to do whatever she likes with.

“Who dat?” she says.

“That’s James,” I say. I’ve never called him James.

“No Jay!” she shouts.

“She thinks I said ‘Jane,’ ” I explain.

“Daisy,” he says reverently, “you look just like your mama.”

The doorman gives me a look as we leave. He doesn’t offer to help us find a cab. But we manage, with my various bundles, to get one at the corner, a fairly new car that gives us a smooth ride to Grand Central, near where Eliot and Daisy and I had lunch the other day.

“We were on a train once,” he says inside the station.

“More than once,” I correct.

“I was referring to the ride of the century.”

“I love you,” I say, though it isn’t what I mean, exactly. I love that he says things like this, that he can be playful about a world which, by now, must seem beyond cruel.

“Ahv oo,” says Daisy. “Oh wuh.”

“Whole world,” I translate for him. “I love you in the whole world.”

“I love you in the whole world,” he repeats distantly.

All that I’ve been under is momentarily lifted by pleasantness, of company, of weather, of endeavor. If I were less shaky, more situated, I’d want to give a party, invite anyone, even Kirsten.

Daisy pulls Fowler’s cap down over his face. He lifts it,
offering her another opportunity, which she takes, and so on until it’s time for us to get to the platform.

“You’ll call,” he says.

•   •   •

I call the house from the station, to see where they are in their day. No one picks up, so I try Kirsten’s.

When she answers, rushed, elated, I seize up.

“Kirsten,” I say, as if shocked to reach her in her own house.

“Hi.”

“Are my kids there.”

“Jane’s here, but Isaac’s out with a friend.”

I ask that she put Jane on.

“Hold on.”

I hear her calling outdoors, singsong. Jane’s response is muffled by outdoor noise, wind, splashing. Maybe some neighbors.

Kirsten gets back on. “She says she knows you’re coming, and she’ll see you at home.”

This is enough of a promise to hold me for days.

I thank her. I can’t pursue her on the subject of Simon right now, try to find out where he’s made arrangements to stay. The fullness of her voice leaves me cold.

On the cab ride over I watch the passing scenery—the strip where I do my marketing, where I pick up the dry cleaning and get the gas, then the mansions where the people we don’t know live, then the houses of the people we do know, the church, the home for the aged. I think I must see it as the driver does, as a stranger would.

•   •   •

Daisy ambles instinctively to the side door, using the Mustard Bomb for balance. I leave the bags outside. Keys out, I let Daisy in.

She is immediately at her toys in the corner of the living
room we’ve devoted to them, the Plastic Junkheap, Simon fondly calls it.

“I’m home,” I call out insanely. I know Isaac isn’t there. He’s not usually home on Sunday afternoons. He goes with friends to a movie or a ball game or plays in one. Once in a while a pack of them troop down to the city to stroll in its funkier parts.

The place is immaculate, which worries me. (Has Jane applied her misery to the house? To cleanliness? Has Simon hired a cleaning woman in my absence?) I trot upstairs with a springiness I haven’t felt since we moved in and the house was new to us, then experience the disappointment of empty bedrooms. My own bed looks untouched, as if it belongs in a hotel room. The bathrooms are spotless, the only evidence of life being in the children’s—toothbrushes lying unrinsed on the sink, Jane’s Aladdin nightgown hanging on the doorknob.

The nightgown’s enough to make me stop, perch on the fuzzy blue toilet seat, take stock. A week ago, I would have cried at this moment. But now crying is out of the question. Nothing should halt the progression, should get in the way of the imminent. I have brought my first love to my home. Come what will.

I listen to the messages on our machine. One from Jane to her father about when to pick her up today. One from Isaac explaining he’ll be home for dinner, which, I figure, means in a couple of hours. Then one from Kirsten, telling me that she’ll bring Jane back at six. The smoothness in her voice tells me I’ve given everyone license to see things to their proper outcome, to do what comes most naturally, i.e., sleep with people they aren’t married to. I marvel at my discomfort with this. The last message is from an unenthused, eerily familiar voice:

“Leigh Adelman? Is that your son speaking? Your husband? Or have you had a sex change? Have you had any sex
at all?
God, is this a drag or what? I’m a total
hausfrau.
It’s Pam calling from Newport, shock of shocks. I haven’t met anyone I like in years. Will you call me?”

Then the number, which I frantically scribble on some junk mail of Simon’s.

I call Fowler right away.

“Pam Tillinghast?” he says. “Is that so shocking?”

“Well, considering that I haven’t spoken to her in seven or eight years, yes, it is shocking. I don’t believe it!”

The ease of his recollection of her unnerves me. But I enjoy the relief her message offers from the gravity of our mission here.

“You haven’t spoken to her in that long?” he muses.

“No!” I sound angry, which I am for some reason. “Why is that so strange? Have you?”

“I’ve run into her a couple of times.”

I stand in the center of the living room, wild with confusion.

“You have?” I say. “You’ve run into Pam? Why would you have run into Pam?”

I sink to crosslegs, and Daisy drags her megablock bag over to me.

“Leigh, honey,” Fowler says.

This is how he used to talk to me, how he talked to me in the car that night outside the clinic, with that posture of weary deference tinged with condescension.

“Why did you see her?”

The seconds of his inability to answer expand, hurt. Even Daisy is still.

“She showed up at a screening at Lincoln Center. I had a long talk with her afterward. We kept up, in a way.”

This is worse for me than the thing I’ve constructed, with help, between Simon and Kirsten.

“You did?”

I straighten my back, lift my head. What would be the
most unendurable right now: to buckle under the discovery of another betrayal on his part.

“Tell me one thing,” I say. “What has this got to do with Isaac?”

“Meaning.”

“Pam told people at Hastings I was pregnant. Remember? Do you have any recollection of that?”

“Of course I do.”

I continue unfazed, like a prosecutor. “I never understood why she did that, why she deliberately made my life and yours a living hell.”

“She was jealous, I suppose. She was unused to being passed over.”

This has the hollow ring of theory.

“Was she?”

“Was she
what?
”

“Passed over.”

“Well,
obviously!”
he says cheerfully, too relieved for my comfort.

I can’t let it go. “Was she passed over?”

“Leigh, really. Let’s move on here.”

“Was she passed over. I want to know.”

“Ultimately, yes. She was passed over.”

“Define ‘ultimately.’ ”

“Please, Leigh. I don’t want to invent suffering. We don’t need to do that.”

For a minute I wait, willing a gentleness between us, a new past.

“Too late,” I tell him.

I hang up. I am a fool to have expected anything different from Fowler. I will always be a fool, and he will always betray me. When he dies he will betray me again. I wander into the kitchen.

“Ope?” Daisy says, of the refrigerator. I open it and rummage,
get us out an apple and some cheese, and cut it all up on a plate.

•   •   •

Jane is dropped off by her father, who keeps the car running on the perimeter of the front lawn and waves to her several times from behind the wheel before easing away. I race downstairs from my perch at the landing window, where I have been sitting for a half hour, Liselotte’s truth open in my lap. I haven’t read ten words. Instead I’ve dreamt a victorious reunion, the happiest of scenarios: weeping admissions of love and need on both our parts, Jane’s mature acceptance of her lot, hints of a future unfettered by dysfunction.

But there’s a weariness about her. She walks heavily, her gym bag slung over her shoulder, her gaze on the bricks. Something has been established in my absence, and my being here threatens it, and it has just driven away and left her here, unsafe. Things are even more different than they were on Saturday at Dad’s when I made my entreaty to be heard and loved despite my indiscretions.

chapter seven

I’ll have no need of advice or scolding from anyone else ever again. Jane will provide me with all I require in these departments. Gillette I will work for. My parents I’ll depend on for the occasional bed and breakfast. Eliot I will call for help and venting, Fowler to satisfy wantonness and vain pursuit. Liselotte can pontificate into the future to Catherine, who will laugh back through the centuries at such earnestness as glorious men chase her through the fields of Provence. I am now seen to. I have a daughter who knows everything and will not be cowed by tawdriness.

“Mom, we have to talk.”

She stands dead center in the living room, full face to the culprit, with ample room for gesture on all sides, of which she makes good use. She and Daisy have recovered from their squealing reunion, and I have sunk into the cushions, trying to summon the hard edge I’ve been cultivating during my days away. It’s the sound of their unknowing love that undoes me, the sound of their unbreakable love.

“Isaac and Dad and I are really mad at you, Mom,” she
declares. “We don’t understand how you can do what you did. And neither does anyone else.”

I don’t know why, but I look for vestiges of laughter, a smirk, an indication that she knows this speech is somehow the wrong one.

“Who
else?” I ask.

“Only
everyone.
Adrienne, Kirsten, the kids at camp, the counselors, Grandpa, Grandma. God, Mom, it’s horrible.”