Friday Mornings at Nine (26 page)

At this, Jennifer could no longer quash her sigh. Granted, Michael wasn’t entirely wrong. She
had
snuck away to meet David on campus already. It
had
crossed her mind to make up an excuse for her absence and just go to the reunion without telling him. So, she knew she deserved some of his disdain. But, other than entertaining the notion of what it would have been like to still be with David, she hadn’t acted on a single one of her sexual fantasies. Michael was behaving as if he had caught her cheating on him, and she hadn’t come close to doing that.

Well, not
very
close.

“I’d rather you didn’t go,” he pronounced.

She squinted at him. She could have shrugged and consented to stay home, but some angry twenty-two-year-old demon inside her just didn’t want to play along. Not with Michael’s dictates. Or with David’s games. How long would they both just push her around if she didn’t set limits somewhere, sometime? And wouldn’t
she
be to blame if she let them get away with it?

“I can understand that,” she said, working hard to keep her voice even. “But I need to attend.”

His eyebrows shot up to midforehead. “You
need
to? Why’s that?”

“I need to see everyone for myself. I need closure.”

“What the hell kind of closure could you possibly need after eighteen years, Jennifer? Be honest with me for a change. You just want to be with your ex again. Make out with him. Maybe screw him. Your mind has been on him for
months
. And, God, I knew it.”

He knew it? How would he have known that? Was he reading her e-mail or something?

She shot him a questioning look, and he laughed—again, that sound like an injured animal.

“I could feel it in the way you’d moved away from me, Jennifer. In the way your attention became so divided. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but I could sense the hugeness of the problem, and it made me…very nervous.” He looked at her, imploring her to obey his command. “He is a massively bad guy. And I’m telling you, for the sake of our marriage, I don’t want you to go to this stupid reunion. I don’t want you to see that bastard again.”

She could never wrap her mind around this idea of people “just sensing” things. Hard for her to believe that was real and not some projection he had made up. She met his gaze and whispered, “I realize that. But I
have
to go.”

“No, you don’t
have
to. You
want
to. And you don’t care what you destroy.” He puffed out some air, pushed past her and vanished upstairs.

Tamara awoke, sometime after ten on Sunday morning, certain the world was going to spin right off its little axis and hurl itself, in pinball fashion, from the moon to Venus to Mars and, probably, to Saturn and Mercury, too, before it was cast out of the solar system altogether and sent crashing into the nearest spiral galaxy.

God almighty. It’d been a hell of a long time since she’d been
this
hung over.

She struggled to remember what it was about the night before that had made it so very deadly. There was that bizarre food at the Wieners’ party. And those drinks—what were they? Oh, yeah. Poisoned Appletinis. How very cutesy.

She tried to lift her head off the pillow, but it reverberated in the center, like five-foot-high speakers at a heavy metal concert. And Jon wasn’t helping matters. What a bloody racket he was making in his office. He was always pounding away at something, even on the weekends. Compiling litigation materials for upcoming cases. Organizing bank bonds, CDs and insurance papers. Printing out Excel spreadsheets with stock projections and the occasional Super Bowl prediction. Always living for the future instead of experiencing life in the now.

Not that the now was so great.

She sank back into her pillow. The now was, in fact, pretty damn shitty.

Squeezing her eyes closed, she ran her fingers through the snarls of matted hair at the back of her head. That idiotic Rapunzel wig had been a pain. But she remembered taking it off at some point in the night. Sometime during the hours she was up in the library loft with Aar—

Oh, fuck!

Aaron had been there with her. He’d asked her to take the wig off, right? The details were kinda fuzzy, but there were parts she remembered. At least she
thought
she remembered. They were talking and laughing. They were drinking weird things. They were playing with some cards on the floor and looking out the window at all the nut jobs in the yard. She vaguely recalled something about foil-wrapped chocolate ghouls. But, it couldn’t have been all true to life because, in her memory, Aaron kissed her, and he didn’t actually do that, did he?

Nope.

She rubbed her head again. She was a mess and, clearly, she’d been hallucinating. She wouldn’t put it past the Wieners to have slipped something illicit into the drinks of their guests. Something that made people mix up their fantasies with their realities.

Damn, drugs were
dangerous
. She felt like a live-action Just Say No warning commercial.

She slid back into a less-than-restful doze, weaving in and out of sleep like Benji when he was a feverish preschooler. She twisted her body to try to get more comfortable, but she was lying on something metallic—a big button on the side of her costume—that kept jabbing her thigh. It took a few minutes of trying to unbutton it before she remembered that the Rapunzel skirt had a zipper in the back and nothing at all on the side. And it wasn’t until she reached into her pocket, her fingers hot against the cool sleekness of Aaron’s watch, that the reality and the fantasy finally separated…like oil and water…and she remembered.

Everything.

Holy crap, Batman.

Despite her throbbing head, she pushed herself up to sitting and glanced around the bedroom she and Jon shared as if she were seeing it for the first time. The walls were painted a dark, restful blue, the room meticulously uncluttered, the mattress firm but well cushioned with a thick foam pad, high-thread-count linen sheets and a fluffy teal coverlet. It was a place that should be indisputably sleep-inducing and, yet, she strongly suspected she wouldn’t rest easy in this bedroom anytime soon.

She opened the bottom drawer of her dresser and gently placed the watch underneath some of her carefully folded tennis socks. Like Scarlett O’Hara, she decided she’d deal with that unpleasantness tomorrow.

Tamara wandered down the hall to where Jon’s noisy printer was spewing out pages of some document—legal or financial in origin. She peered at him through the slit in the door, his dark eyes so intent on his project she couldn’t help but be reminded of when she’d met him. The intense, incredibly serious law student he’d been, one who lacked the ability to relax even in his early twenties, possessed an earnestness in his expression those years ago that she only caught glimpses of now. But she had once loved the combination of qualities she saw on his face. Solemnity plus industriousness. She had no idea then that they would later manifest as detachment and cool ambition.

Two sides of the same coin, really. Though that was the gift and curse of marriage, too, wasn’t it? Novelty and fascination eventually flips to familiarity and indifference.

“Finally up?” Jon said to her, his voice scratchy from lack of use this morning.

She pushed his office door open a few inches more. “Yeah. I’m not feeling great, though. Too many Appletinis.”

His lips twisted into a small smirk. “I remember you were really swigging them last night. That runner guy down the street looked wasted, too.” Jon shook his head. “People who can’t hold their liquor shouldn’t drink.”

She didn’t comment. Not because she didn’t want to. Jon had had nearly as much to drink as she, and he hadn’t exactly been the poster child for sobriety at other parties they had attended. But the mere mention of Aaron sent her pulse racing and made her throat too dry for speech.

She grunted something about getting a glass of water and drifted away from him. Jon’s facial expression stayed with her, however. A captivating photograph on her mind’s movie screen for one surprising reason: there was no emotional reaction evident in his eyes at all. His serious intensity was not directed toward her. And she, in the kitchen, combating dehydration with a glassful of spring water, found this far more interesting intellectually than she should have.

Jon wasn’t angry with her about lounging in the Wieners’ library loft and pouring Appletinis down her throat for hours while he gallivanted around the party and made contacts. Oh, no. He didn’t care. As long as her behavior didn’t reflect poorly on him. As long as his networking goals weren’t hindered by her in any way. As long as she didn’t publicly embarrass him, he didn’t pay attention to her.

Despite the fuzziness, she thought back and remembered that the only time he had admonished her at all was when she had tangentially criticized the mayor. Jon seemed completely unfazed by the fact that she had been drinking heavily, skirting participation in the outdoor party games and hanging out with another man (aka: “runner guy”) for most of the night.

And, come to think of it, she hadn’t really spared Jon more than a thought or two throughout the entirety of the evening either.

Thoughts of Aaron, by contrast, were registering seventeen out of ten on her emotional Richter scale. She poured herself a second full glass of water and fought her pounding headache long enough to rationalize this away. An absorbing over-interest in another person was the hallmark of infatuation. It made people’s body organs work overtime, their lust hormones kick up a fuss and their imaginations shoot into overdrive. But it
always
disappeared eventually. Even with Jon, at the beginning, they’d had some happyish moments, although those feelings ended sooner rather than later because Benji came into their lives so early.

She meandered into their sunroom and curled into a ball on Benji’s old brown beanbag chair. They had a nice house. One that had a spacious den, a brick patio, a raised deck. She had a lovely garden and the luxury of time to tend it. She had an expansive kitchen with gorgeous granite countertops. If she had chosen to have her son on her own…if she had insisted on raising him by herself and not testing Jon’s dutifulness…would she live in a house like this? Would she have been able to afford to send her son to a good college out of state?

Possibly but doubtful. And there was really no fooling herself about the reality of single parenthood. It would have been
very
hard, at least in the beginning. It maybe would have always been hard. So, in a number of ways, she owed Jon for his support of them, even if his reasons for doing it were equally selfish. Even if the
appearance
of the good life was, for him, synonymous with actually
experiencing
the good life. The only thing he had to give up was the notion of ever finding true love himself. And, of course, he made her give that up, too.

A pair of squirrels darted across the lawn. How diligent they were. So productive on this humdrum Sunday morning, gathering and storing nuts for the long winter ahead. She finished her glass of water and could have used another but was still too nauseated to want to move, so she kept her eye on the supposedly simpler creatures in nature.

Only, to her, they seemed kind of wise out there. The squirrels—maybe they were a couple?—worked so well together. Human couples were lucky when they could achieve that kind of marital synchronicity. Relationships were so complicated, and the path strewn with thorns, that everybody struggled somewhere down the line. Early in the dating process. Those rough first years of marriage. Later, when midlife crises and doubts rushed in.

Passion waxed and waned across the board, didn’t it? And so many times, people who had dealt with hardships in their relationship at first, grew into mature adults who retained a warm appreciation for each other and for the memories—even the challenges—they had shared. Perhaps their initial fiery ardor evaporated over the years, but a tender respect was forged in its place. Though both parties would have to want that. To be willing to work to reinvent their couplehood.

The threads of these thoughts trailed after her throughout the rest of the day, like loose ends on a fabric, needing to either be tied into a knot or snipped away.

She awoke the next morning with less severe physical symptoms, enabling her to both think and talk more clearly, but Jon had already left for work and the nature of her unanswered questions involved more than just him anyway.

She waited at home for several hours, wondering if Aaron might venture over to retrieve his wristwatch. He did not. Nevertheless, she busied herself by watching a morning talk show, flipping through some dusty old Austen novel, fine-tuning her résumé and e-mailing out a few tester job applications. The employment climate was harsh out there, but she had to start somewhere. And getting feedback of any kind would be useful, whether she ended up working from home or at a company in the city.

Much as she tried to stay active, however, the sensations from Aaron’s kiss still lingered like phantom lips on hers. She couldn’t stop replaying what she
thought
she remembered. And Tamara, believing introspection could only take a woman so far, decided one real-life encounter was worth five hundred mental simulations.

She snatched the watch from her sock drawer, slipped on her sneakers and strode over to Aaron’s house, the frigid gusts of wind reminding her they were headed into the cold season.

At her knock, he yanked the door open. She almost took a step back when she saw him. Dark smudges under his eyes. Puffy face. Wrinkled sweats. Hair that hadn’t seen shampoo in a few days.

He looked like hell with a hangover.

Then, again, she wasn’t exactly a ray of perkiness and sunshine, was she? But she knew she looked better today than she had yesterday. If this was his
better,
she had a hard time imagining the rotten shape he must have been in the morning after the party.