The Cousins (13 page)

“To take a shower. If I lie here a minute longer I’ll fall asleep.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“I have to go home.”

“Oh,” she said flatly.

“I’m expected for dinner,” Roger said. He didn’t like the tone of her voice or the look she was giving him. She had never done this before. “Honey, you know how it is,” he said mildly, hoping she wouldn’t make him feel guilty. She knew the rules. She always had.

“Yes. I know how it is.” She went into the bedroom. He hurried into the bathroom, as much to escape her criticism as to wash away all signs of what had just transpired so he could return to his ordered life.

When he came out to dress Wendy was sitting on the couch hunched in a terrycloth robe, moodily drinking her wine. She didn’t look like a contented, relaxed woman who had just had four orgasms—she looked like a neglected waif.

“We need to talk,” she said. The sky was black outside the window.

Roger looked at his watch. It was, he noted nervously, after eight. “I have to go. Can we talk later?”

“When is later?”

“Tomorrow. I’ll call you from outside.”

“I need to talk face-to-face.”

“Next time.”

“Not next time. This time.”

“What is the matter with you?” he asked. He picked up his glass of wine and took a quick gulp. The wine had gotten warm. He began to feel the tension creep into the back of his neck.

“Take some fresh from the cooler,” she said, gesturing.

He wavered. “I have to go.”

“Hear me out.”

“All right,” Roger said. He took a glass from the bar and poured himself another.

“This isn’t enough,” Wendy said. “I need more of the real you. I need time for us together just doing the things normal people do.”

“We do that—”

“When she’s away. I don’t want to be second best.”

The tension squeezed the back of his neck and his jaws until his head began to hurt. “You’re not second best,” he protested. “You have the part of me no one else knows.”

“I appreciate that. I would also like to wake up with you on Sunday mornings.”

“No, you wouldn’t. It’s no pleasure.”

“I want to cuddle with you. I want to take a walk with you, go to a play, a party, show you off. I want to have a goddamn whole meal in a restaurant with you.”

“Oh, Wendy. Why are you doing this now?”

“Because I’m in love with you,” she said.

All the times she had told him that, he had enjoyed believing her because it was a necessary part of their affair. Now, suddenly, when she said it, it was ominous. He wished he didn’t have to believe it.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “I never meant to.”

“You tell me you’ll protect and cherish me and then you don’t.”

“But . . . it’s part of the
game
,” he blurted out.

Wendy’s eyes filled with tears, and then they overflowed. “I know,” she said quietly.

“Oh, Wendy.” He put his arms around her and held her. He was awash with tenderness for her, this wounded creature, and at the same time he felt choked and trapped. This was never the way it was supposed to be. “Please don’t,” he said, smoothing her hair off her forehead, letting her cry against his shoulder. His skin was crawling. She was so unpredictable. She could do anything. As soon as she stopped crying he stood up.

“Now I really have to go,” he said with authority, and this time she didn’t stop him.

When he got home the assistant was finishing up before closing the clinic for the night. He went upstairs to Olivia, who was in the living room watching television. “Oh, there you are,” Olivia said. “You’re so late.” He patted the dogs, who were overjoyed to see him.

“Buster, Buster,” he said. “Wozzle, Wozzle.” Now he could face her. “I needed to unwind,” he said, “so after I worked out I ran some laps around the track.”

“How was it?”

“Good. You should try it sometime.”

“Maybe I will.”

She had set two places on the coffee table in front of the television and opened a bottle of wine. He put down his gym bag and poured himself a glass of wine to disguise the scent of Wendy’s wine on his breath.

“I’m making plain steamed vegetables tonight,” Olivia said. “I’m tired of everything else.”

“You mean I need to go on a diet.”

“Will you stop?” she said.

“I know you.”

“Well, I know you, too.”

They smiled at each other, best friends. He kissed her on top of the head. While the vegetables steamed they watched the news on CNN for a few minutes. Later they would discuss their day. He looked at her and thought how happy and contented she made him, not by any one thing in particular that she did, but just by being there, by helping to weave this cozy fabric of their life together. And she was still so beautiful. If he weren’t so exhausted, later he would have tried to . . .

“Dinner is ready,” Olivia said, as the timer went off in the kitchen. He helped her carry the food to the living room and they settled down.

“This is good,” he said.

“Because it’s fresh.”

“I could eat this more often.”

“We always say that and then we forget.”

“No, because we crave spareribs and fried rice.”

“I don’t crave spareribs,” Olivia said. “I crave chocolate.”

The phone rang. They both looked at it.

“Ignore it,” Roger said.

“No, it’s the clinic line.”

“It’s my turn,” he said reluctantly.

It was the assistant, Terry. “Mrs. Adler’s here with her Great Dane,” Terry said. “I don’t know how she managed to get him here. He’s as big as a truck and he’s having some kind of a fit.”

“I’ll be right down,” Roger said. Olivia looked at him questioningly. “Adler’s Great Dane.”

“Do you want me to help you?”

“No, it’s all right. I’ll be back soon. Terry’s there.”

The huge old dog, it turned out, had been having a series of little strokes, just like a person, and was crazed with fear. By the time Roger got him stabilized and it looked like he was going to live, it was midnight. The dog would spend the next few days at the clinic for observation. Mrs. Adler, who was as big as her dog, insisted on staying with him; so since it was late and Roger was too tired to move, much less argue, he let her sleep on the couch in the waiting room.

“What people do for love,” he told Olivia later.

“Of course,” she said.

He crawled into bed beside her, inhaling her scent, feeling her warmth. Just as he fell into sleep, as if he were floating into a deep, soft well, a thought scratched at the edge of his mind. The gym bag. Where was the gym bag? Was it still in the living room? He hadn’t even looked.

But if Olivia had gone to put his workout clothes into the washing machine, and discovered they were unused, she would certainly have said something to him. She wouldn’t have just left the subject of his lie alone.

No, it was fine. He’d take care of it tomorrow. She had acted the same as ever when he came back upstairs. And if there was one thing he knew about Olivia, it was that unlike him, she never kept secrets.

14

W
HEN
R
OGER WENT DOWNSTAIRS
to the clinic to take care of Mrs. Adler’s dog, Olivia cleared away the dishes. She put the rest of the steamed vegetables into the refrigerator and made a fast fat-free dip so he could eat them cold in case he was hungry later. As she corked the wine and put it into the fridge she thought that perhaps they should stop drinking every night. Wine had a lot of calories. She never kept any fattening treats in the house anymore, not even frozen yogurt, but Roger, despite his strict regimen at the gym, didn’t look much different from when he had started. Sometimes that happened when people got older; their metabolism slowed. Poor Roger. Working out so hard just to maintain.

She noticed his gym bag lying on the living room floor where he had left it, and she opened it to put his used gym clothes into the washing machine the way he always did. That was another thing she liked about Roger: that he was so fastidious—he wouldn’t leave those smelly, sweaty things in the bag any longer than he had to.

But when she reached in and took his gym clothes out she realized with shock that they had obviously not been used. There was his gray sweatshirt, fluffy and folded and still smelling faintly of fabric softener; there were his fresh, unironed shorts; there were his pristine white socks; still folded in half the way Peggy, the cleaning woman, liked to do it.

For an instant it didn’t quite register. Then she felt a chill stab of fear.
He said he was late because he had worked out longer
. He was very tired, but he hadn’t been to the gym at all. Her stomach turned over.

He had lied to her. Why?

Maybe he had washed and dried his clothes at the gym. Impossible. Bought new ones? Not these.

She always worried that he would die because they were so happy, and you never knew when your luck would run out. Had he been to the doctor and was he hiding it from her—having secret tests? Cancer? Heart problems? But not so late in the evening, and his hair had been damp. He had taken a shower. You didn’t take a shower at the doctor’s office or after a few hours at the hospital, even if you’d had a stress test, and his hair had been damp from a shampooing, not from perspiration.

Why were you lying to me, Roger?

Standing there with Roger’s clean workout clothes in her hands, she was suddenly repelled by them, as if they were the instrument of her betrayal, and she put them down. A part of her already sensed—no, knew. He was having an affair. And at the same time that she knew, the rest of her kept pleading that it not be true. She was numb with pain and loss.

She wondered if it was her fault. What had she done wrong, what lapse, what disappointing things to make him feel something was missing from their relationship, even to hurt him? She remembered with an ache how she had laughed in the hotel room in Cambridge when he was trying to initiate imaginative sex. Had his affair started then, or before that? Was he just tired of her?

She tried to think back to see if there had been other suspicious times she had not noticed when Roger had lied to her, incidents she had dismissed. She was too shaken to remember, and she realized she was in a kind of shock. She felt as if her mind was walking under water. But she had to remember . . . try, try. . . .

All those times she had gone alone to see her family and Roger had refused to go, he could easily have started an affair then. It was unlikely he had been seeing a woman all these years without her suspecting something, but anything was possible. Who was he anyway, this man she loved so much and had thought she knew so well? In one horrible moment he had become a stranger.

His fascination with exercise had begun about a year ago. Maybe longer. She couldn’t even remember exactly when. When had things started to be different? He had kept his trail so hidden, or maybe she had refused to see.

Grady had come to lunch and Roger had returned home with wine on his breath, saying the gym had been too crowded so he had gone out to lunch alone instead. Maybe that had been true—now she didn’t know.

He could have met the woman at the gym. Or when he was home all by himself he could have met her in a movie line, the way he had met
her
. He could have met the woman anywhere; she could even be a client.

A client . . . the cat scratch. Last Thanksgiving when Olivia had noticed the cat scratch on Roger’s thigh. He’d said it happened at the clinic, and at the time it had never occurred to her to wonder how a cat could have scratched him so deeply on the thigh right through his clothes.

But now she knew:
Because he hadn’t been wearing them
. The thought made her sick with rage. Roger making love to someone else. The pain rose inside her then with full force and she started to sob. How could she survive this?

Finally, cried out, drained, she wandered into the den. They kept their personal appointment books there, and she looked through Roger’s. There was very little they had not done together—they even saw their accountant together—and his other appointments were equally innocuous: checkup, dentist, haircut. He was so precise he had even written down each time he went to the gym.

Or, as she now knew, even the times he had not gone to the gym.

She looked through his phone book. There were no names there she didn’t know. Why would there be? The next time he went to “exercise” she would look through his client’s phone book downstairs and see if she could remember every woman who had a cat; if, in fact, his girlfriend was a client at all.

What was she supposed to do now—put up with it and spy and nail him? Tell him, as soon as he came upstairs, that she knew? Leave or throw him out, and tear up the life they had made together, now that he had started the mortal rip? Swallow her devastation and humiliation and fight to keep him? He didn’t seem to be going anywhere; he liked things just the way they were. That thought more enraged than comforted her. How could she even sleep in the same bed with him tonight?

How could she sleep in that bed alone, without Roger, for the rest of her nights?

She went into the living room and put Roger’s unused workout clothes back into the bag and zipped it up. She would survive, but she had to figure out how. Whatever she did, it would have to be according to her own timetable. She would watch, and she would wait. She wouldn’t confront him tonight. She wasn’t ready. She couldn’t bear to think how she would handle it if he admitted everything before she was ready to hear it.

When he came back a little after midnight she had herself under control. Oblivious that anything had changed, he told her the story of big Mrs. Adler insisting on sleeping all night on the reception-room couch to be near her dog.

“What people do for love,” he said.

“Of course,” Olivia answered. He had no idea that she was talking about herself.

15

O
LIVIA WOULD NEVER
have believed that she had so much stealth in her, or that she could dissemble so well. Looking at Roger doing his ordinary things, saying his usual pleasant words, she composed her face and wondered if he suspected anything. When he came out of the shower into the bedroom she looked at his body with the eyes of another woman seeing it for the first time, and then glanced down to his penis which she now shared with some stranger, and wondered if her anger showed. Sometimes she remained numb and bewildered, and other times her feelings swirled around inside her and made her feel ill.

What was perhaps even worse, she thought, was having to look at his lips. He had lied with them, and probably spoken love with them, and he had kissed another woman in places she didn’t want to think about, and somehow that seemed even more intimate than fucking.

“What are you looking at?” he asked once, and she answered innocuously, “You,” as if that were normal; and there had been a time it was.
You
was so ambiguous.
You
, the cheat.
You
, my love.
You
, my lost love, the betrayer.

They continued to use the Jacuzzi together as usual, but now she too pretended to be too tired to do anything there but unwind. He massaged her shoulders as he always did. “You’re so tense,” he said. She merely sighed, and he took it as assent and relief at his ministrations.

I’m tense because you’re someone I don’t know anymore, she thought. Because you’ve ruined what we had and I hate you. And because I want you to keep touching me and I love you.

She knew she needed time.

When he returned from the gym, or wherever he really went, he always put his gym clothes into the washing machine for Peggy, and Olivia waited until he was otherwise occupied and then took them out to inspect them. He had a pattern. He went to the gym twice a week, and lied to her the other two times. He was having a regular affair, not just an occasional thing, and that made it more terrible. She wondered if he was planning to leave her.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if all the time she was gathering up her courage to confront him, perhaps leave him, he was intending to do it to her first?

She wanted to catch him making a phone call to the woman. So far she had been unable to—the office was too busy, there were too many people around to wonder what she was up to. Then, one day at lunchtime, when the assistants were out and the phones had been turned over to voice mail, Olivia saw the little red light go on indicating Roger’s office extension. That watchful little red eye, the alarm to her brain. Slowly, carefully, she picked up the receiver in her own office and listened, her hand over the receiver so he would not hear her breathe, if, indeed, she was breathing at all.

“Roosevelt Island Tramway,” she heard him saying, in a voice she was not used to.

“Cool,” a soft female voice answered; the word drawn out, a prurient whisper.

“Is someone on this line?” Roger asked sharply. “Hello? Olivia?”

“Oh, sorry,” Olivia said briskly, as if it had been a simple mistake, and hung up. Her heart was pounding. Sorry? Sorry! He was the one who should be sorry. She pretended to be looking through a medical report on her desk when Roger looked in through her open door.

“I’m going to go out and get some exercise,” Roger said. “I’ll be back soon.”

I’ll bet you are, bastard. “I’ll go to the gym with you,” Olivia said cheerfully. “I could use a break.”

He looked at her, surprised. They never went to the gym together; it was one of the few things they liked to do separately.

“I thought I might just take a long walk,” he said.

“You don’t want company?” She hoped her voice wasn’t shaking.

“You have patients soon,” Roger said.

“You’d rather be alone.” Not accusingly, just adding up another crime.

“I need to clear my head.”

“Of course.”

As soon as Roger left she went to the front window that overlooked the street. He walked to the corner briskly, without his gym bag, and then he hailed a taxi and got into it. Olivia grabbed her coat and ran outside and got into another cab.

“Roosevelt Island Tramway,” she said to the driver.

She had passed it and seen it, but had never been on it. She never had any need to go to Roosevelt Island. She wondered if Roger went there, or if the tram was simply a rendezvous. There were stairs leading up to a place where you could wait for the little red commuter tram that traveled on its cable high over the water like a dangling plaything. It was a slow time for commuters, and she knew if she climbed the stairs to wait for the tram with him he would see her. Or maybe he wouldn’t.

She went up cautiously, keeping far back.

She saw him standing there, his back to her. There were a couple of old men, an old woman, a teenage couple, and a young woman, very pretty, with light hair. She looked familiar. The young woman and Roger glanced at each other and looked away. Olivia moved closer to the stairway wall, hoping they couldn’t see her, still able to see them. When the tram stopped, Roger and the young woman got on with the other people and sat together although there were many empty seats. They did not appear to speak or even to know each other, but that made it just as obvious she was the one he was meeting.

When the tram moved away, Olivia went quickly down the stairs to the street. Maybe that woman lived over there. Who was she, anyway? She knew the face.

Brown Abyssinian cat, very high strung. Gregory. New patient, come for a checkup. Wendy . . . Wilton. Yes! So the woman Roger was seeing had become a client. Now she could look up the records, and soon she would be able to know everything. For the first time Olivia felt the strain lifting in the exhilaration of the quest. Soon the wondering would be over. And then, of course, the nightmare would begin, because it would at last be too real to ignore anymore. All the evidence she needed would be in.

Back at the office Olivia went through her patient files and found Wendy Wilton’s home address and phone number. She called to hear her voice on the answering machine. It was the same as on the phone today, not that she needed any more corroboration. But there was one more thing she had to do. She took a blank piece of paper, folded it, put it into an office envelope and wrote Roger’s name on it.

She saw patients for an hour, her mind on automatic pilot. The adrenaline was pouring through her bloodstream, but at the same time she felt strangely calm. Roger wasn’t back yet, but she hadn’t expected him to be. She checked her watch. Then she told Terry to tell the rest of the patients she would be running a little late, and she took a cab to Wendy Wilton’s apartment building.

It was a nice building, with a doorman, on the East Side. Obviously the woman had some money. Olivia told the cabdriver to wait and gave the envelope to the doorman. “This is from Dr. Hawkwood’s office,” she told the doorman. “He said he would be dropping by here today. To see Ms. Wilton.”

“They just went up,” the doorman said. “Shall I ring?”

They just went up
. It hit her like a blow to the heart. Olivia flashed him her brightest smile and handed him a five-dollar bill. “Could you please send it up?” she asked.

“Of course.”

She got into her waiting cab and told him to take her back to the office. All the way there she couldn’t stop shaking, as if she had the worst kind of flu. They were in there, the two of them, in Wendy Wilton’s apartment. But she’d had to know for sure. And now Roger would know she knew. She held her arms tightly around her body to try to stop the trembling, and she had never felt so alone in her life.

* * *

The part of her that was strong kept her looking and acting sane while she saw the rest of the afternoon’s patients. How good and loving they were, these furry dogs and cats with their sweet eyes. If you sent your pet away it tried to come back to you. They did not deceive or lie or look for someone they would rather be with. Once they had committed, they were yours, a member of the family. You could trust their loyalty. You could grow old together. No wonder some people finally gave up on relationships with people and just had pets. She had always thought it was somewhat pathetic, but now for the first time she could understand.

After a while she heard Roger come into the office and begin to attend to his own patients. Her nerve fibers responded as they always had to the sound of his familiar voice, filling her with warm reassurance, and then her mind took over and she was cold with rage. Be dignified, she told herself. Walk tall, be calm. She decided she would pretend to know even more than she did without being specific enough for him to know when she was faking.

At the end of their day she passed him in the hall. “I’m going up to the apartment now,” she said. He looked frightened.

“I’ll be right up myself,” he said.

Upstairs in the welcoming rooms she had once believed were a refuge, Olivia repaired her makeup and poured herself a glass of wine. One sip, and then she put it down. She wanted full control of her faculties.

The door opened and Roger came in. He didn’t say anything, he just looked at her.

“So you’re having an affair with Wendy Wilton,” Olivia said.

“I . . .”

“I know about the gym clothes, the phone calls, the meetings, the lies, the fact that her doorman knows you. Don’t lie any more now because then I’ll hate you.”

“You’ll hate me anyway,” Roger said.

“At least you didn’t say: ‘It’s not what you think.’ ”

“It’s not.”

“I’m sure it’s worse.”

He closed his eyes. She thought he looked very pale.

“Why did you need someone else?” she asked.

There was a long pause. “Why are you asking me a question that is so hard to answer?” he said finally, softly, sounding beaten.

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“Hard for you to answer or for me to hear?”

“Oh, Olivia . . .”

“I want to know,” Olivia said.

“I don’t love her,” Roger said. “Not at all. She knows that.”

“She must feel very used.”

He sighed. “For what it’s worth, I’ve never done this to you before,” he said. “Never in all these years.”

“Really.”

“I promise.”

“Then what makes her so special?”

“I don’t want to talk about her,” Roger said.

“Then let’s talk about us. Why now?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know . . . She . . . I don’t know.”

“Obviously she had something you needed that you couldn’t get with me.”

“I love you,” Roger said. “It’s you I love, I want to spend my life with you. I can’t imagine life without you.”

“You wanted both of us.”

He sighed again.

“Is she better in bed than I am? No, forget I asked that. I don’t want to hear it.”

“An affair is exciting and dangerous,” Roger said. “That’s the only thing she and I had that you and I didn’t have. It has nothing to do with you. You’re my heart. She’s like a stranger.”

“And you had sex with her twice a week and could hardly ever bring yourself to make love to me. What does that mean?”

“I’m too old to satisfy two women,” Roger said.

“Oh, sure, when it suits your purpose to say it.”

“I am.”

“Then why couldn’t you have tried to work it out with me? If you don’t find me exciting anymore, is that the end of it? Ten years is all it can last?”

Roger poured himself a glass of wine. His hand was shaking ever so slightly. “Olivia, I’m not going to leave you.”

“You already did.”

“Don’t say that. It isn’t true.”

“Everything’s different now,” Olivia said. She couldn’t believe how calm she was. It was as if she were watching herself from one step away. “I might have to leave
you
.”

“Don’t.”

“Then you can be with her all the time.”

“That’s the last thing I want. If I had wanted that I would have done it.”

“Will you stop seeing her?”

A pause. “Yes.”

“Because I want you to?”

“Because that’s the way it is.”

“Not because I want you to, or you wouldn’t have started with her in the first place. And not because you want to. It’s because I found out and you’re afraid I might go. Life stinks.”

“But I do want to, Olivia. I wanted to for quite a while, but I didn’t know how.”

“And now you’ll find a way.”

He didn’t answer. She supposed his silence meant she had been right. He would have kept both of them as long as he could, drifting along, selfish, weak, needing Olivia to force the break.

The image floated into her mind of her second husband, Stuart, who had cheated with all those women. What was wrong with her that she had such bad luck? Was it her fault? Did she pick men like that? Did she drive them away? Or was that what you had to expect? No, Stuart had flaunted it. He was not Roger. But this Roger wasn’t Roger either.

“I want you to sleep in the den until this is all settled,” Olivia said. “I can’t have you coming home from her to me.”

“All right,” he said quietly.

“And I’m going to have an AIDS test. There are no free rides anymore. I think you should have one, too.”

“She did,” he said, sounding embarrassed. “She’s fine.”

“Where did you meet her, anyway?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“I want to know.”

“At the gym.”

Of course, why not? All those cute little things with their makeup on, and their jewelry, and their perky ponytails, and their designer workout clothes with the thong in back showing off their tight little buns. . . . “What does she do for a living?”

“She’s a stockbroker.”

Smart, too. And wanted Roger, who was taken. And had gotten him. Olivia didn’t know what to believe in anymore.

“I thought if you and I didn’t get married it would stay romantic,” she said sadly. “I thought this time it would work. We were so happy.”

“We are happy,” Roger said, his eyes pleading. She almost melted at that look on his face, but she looked away until she had herself under control again.

“We might as well have been married,” she said. “We have all this community property. The house, our practice. It would be like a divorce. Dividing everything up. The lawyers. Selling the house, dividing the patients. Would we keep the clinic and work together as friends—such a modern divorce—or would we have to lose it along with all our other dreams? At least we wouldn’t have to fight over the kids.”