The Neighbors Are Watching (9 page)

But as soon as Labor Day came and went, it was as if a switch had been flipped inside her and she was awake as soon as the sunlight began seeping between the slats of the tightly drawn blinds. She fought consciousness with all the tools at her disposal, one of which was a brand-new Ambien prescription, but they were all weak against the force of her circadian rhythms. After a decade of teaching, her body knew when summer was over and it was time to go back to work. But so far her body had refused to accept her brain’s memo that for her school was still out, work was off, and the best plan of action was to remain suspended in unconsciousness until further notice.

She turned her pillow over and moved to Joe’s considerably cooler side
of the bed. He’d left for work early—at eight or nine. Allison’s sense of time had become sketchy. She didn’t even know whether Joe was working mostly days or nights anymore. Once upon a time they’d tried to synchronize their schedules so that they could spend as much time together as possible. Now Allison suspected he was putting in extra hours at the restaurant just to get out of the house. Because he
was
putting in extra hours, he’d made sure to point that out to her. Since she was taking a leave of absence from school, he said, it was necessary for him to be as diligent as possible at his own job. This didn’t make a blind bit of difference because Joe was on salary, but he thought—or at least he
said
—that being there more “might lead to more opportunities.”

As she shut her eyes against the slanting light in the room, it occurred to Allison how strange it was that she and Joe still slept in the same bed every night. It wasn’t that she had asked or even hinted that he should sleep elsewhere, nor had she moved to another room, but she couldn’t understand how he could get into bed next to her every night without any sign of discomfort. There might as well have been a glacier between the two of them for all the cold distance in their relationship, yet Joe never seemed bothered by it—at least not enough to lose any sleep—and Allison resented his lack of insomnia.

Allison had read plenty of women’s magazines and novels and knew well the story of a wife who realizes one day that the husband she thought she knew was a stranger to her. Allison thought it might actually be easier if Joe
was
like a stranger to her, but he was more familiar to her now than ever. Diana’s sudden appearance in their lives had changed everything
except
Joe.

Joe’s stoicism—or at least his ability to carry on as if everything was just fine—was something Allison had always admired. They’d had a slab leak a few years ago; they’d come downstairs to find the carpet soaked through with water from a leaking pipe laid beneath the house in California’s famously shifting earth. Allison’s first response was to become slightly hysterical over the cost to fix it and the damage to the floor and carpet, but
Joe was completely calm and methodical, even joking at one point about what else they might find buried under the house.

There had also been the time, not long after they had married, when Allison’s mother’s health deteriorated rapidly for no apparent reason. Joe had been wonderful then, Allison remembered, encouraging her to keep taking care of her own self in order to better help her mother. He was unwaveringly supportive and showed her the importance of continuing to eat, sleep, and work regularly—of not letting the main problem cause other problems. In the end, her mother’s health improved in the same mysterious way it had declined, but Allison was sure that without Joe’s support—without his get-on-with-it approach—she would have crumpled under the strain. But now, she
was
falling apart, and watching Joe continue to eat, work, and sleep as usual grated on her precisely because he
could
. She wondered if this was simply because he didn’t have the emotional capacity to truly understand what she was going through. Maybe he never had.

Whenever they’d had disagreements or, more accurately, whenever there was something bothering Allison about their relationship, Joe’s approach was almost always the same. First he asked her if she wanted to talk about it—always hoping that she’d say no because that would enable him to skip the next step, which was to actually attempt a full discussion. Allison knew that Joe disliked this kind of conversation; it was too confrontational for him, and, as he so often told her, he got enough of that at work, having to settle disputes between waiters or pacify customers. So sometimes Allison gave him a pass on the “talk” and just ceded the argument. But when she did press him, Joe had a limited tolerance. There was only so far he could go before he shut down and left them both in silence. Inevitably, though, Joe moved to his final phase, which was to avoid words altogether and go straight to sex. And that, thought Allison, always worked. At least it had until now.

For the first couple of weeks after Diana’s arrival, Joe had leaned over to her in bed and pawed at her like a starving bear. At first she said nothing, just lay there unresponsive in the dark until he sighed, gave up, and went to
sleep. It wasn’t that she was disgusted by him. In fact, Allison believed that no matter what happened she would never find Joe physically repulsive. But there was now a searing shame in the sexual act for Allison—and that was not even counting the deeply disturbing comment Diana had made about listening to the two of them on that awful night—and it left no room for desire even if she had been willing to allow desire in. There was more. Sex and grief had become inextricably tangled for Allison now and there was no undoing it. But Joe couldn’t or wouldn’t sense this, so he kept trying; he kept trying to make it right with his body, kept trying to get them to be one flesh. Finally, after several such attempts, Allison just came out with it. One of his hands was on her breast, squeezing it like a fruit, and the other was probing between her legs with all the subtlety of a gynecological exam.

“Stop it, Joe.”

He’d frozen in shock, his hands still where they lay, and Allison realized that in all the years they’d been together—edging in on a decade—she’d never once said no. He got it then, Allison remembered. After a moment, he moved his hands from her body and turned away from her. Allison didn’t lie there much longer before getting up and going downstairs for a drink.

Since then, Joe had just carried on as usual, and there was nothing strange about that at all. No, Allison would not wake up and find herself married to a stranger. She wished she would. At least then they’d both have an excuse for what had happened to their marriage. But then Joe needed no excuse. He had no emotional torment to keep him from eating, sleeping, or working as he always did—which is why he came to their bed every night and slept like a baby.

Baby
.

The very word gave Allison pain. She tried to push the images down, deep into the swamp of her feelings, but they wouldn’t stay there. They never did anymore. Instead she tried to piece it out, to separate the elements
of her misery and look at each one to better understand why their sum was causing her such pain.

She and Joe had been dating for six months when she got pregnant—a shock for both of them, though not as unpleasant for Allison as it was for Joe. She told nobody, not even her own mother. Allison still regretted that and didn’t understand why she’d isolated herself in that way. Joe had been calm, but very clear. They didn’t know each other well enough, Allison was so young and just beginning her career, he wasn’t ready to be a father and didn’t think he could give enough of anything to a child. He didn’t want it. Unequivocally. No. But ultimately, he told her, it would be her decision. He couldn’t force her to do anything. The next thing he should have said but never did was that he would support her no matter what. But Joe told her he couldn’t guarantee anything beyond his legal obligations. “I’m just not ready,” he said. “And I don’t think you are either.”

Allison believed him. So she agreed that, yes, it was the best thing. She arranged it herself. Joe paid and waited outside for her. He took her home afterward and tucked her into bed, lying next to her on top of the blankets and holding her hand. “I’m so sorry,” he said. And again she believed him. Three months later he asked her to marry him. Before this moment she’d never thought of that proposal as a reward.

Allison had never made her peace with that decision; it was impossible when she was the one who was ultimately responsible for making it. That was a big part of the reason that she never brought it up with Joe, why she never asked him—when he said yes they would have a baby one day when they were ready because there was plenty of time, why not then? Why weren’t we ready then? Now, when she wanted to scream it at him her voice was strangled inside her.

At least there was one part of this mess—Diana and her pregnancy, with all its in-your-face evidence of betrayal and babies—that would soon be over, Allison thought. Diana would deliver, some couple would get the infant they couldn’t create on their own, and then Joe’s daughter would go
home to the mother who’d banished her. Perhaps then Allison would even be able to think about puzzling together the exploded pieces of her life and her marriage to see if anything could be made whole again.

Allison felt a stab of pure hatred for Diana’s mother, and not because the woman had sent her own daughter to live with strangers at a time when she most needed a mother to guide her. What twisted Allison’s gut was deeper than that. She was angry at this woman she had never met for giving birth to Diana in the first place. Why had she and not Allison been allowed to have Joe’s baby? Why had that woman been allowed to make a different decision?

Allison kicked off the sheets and sat up. The temperature in the room seemed to have gone up by at least ten degrees in the last ten minutes. It was going to be another hot, dry day; that much was clear. It hadn’t rained for months. The air was parched. It had never bothered her before. She’d always loved the sunshine—been a complete hog for it—and this city had always obliged. But now rain—slashing, driving sheets of it—was all she wanted.

It was one of those rare rainy days, Allison now remembered, when she’d met Joe. She was attending some ridiculous singles mixer—a hideously awkward event that she’d allowed her mother to talk her into. Her mother, in some ways a complete throwback, thought that her daughter was in danger of becoming a permanent spinster because Allison was still single at the overripened age of twenty-four. Allison wasn’t even dating at the time; she was too focused on teaching her new class of third graders and pacifying their overanxious, demanding parents. But her mother was so insistent (“Oh, just give it a try, Allison; it isn’t normal to sit at home night after night. Soon you’ll be getting a cat, then two cats, and you know where that goes. What’s the worst thing that can happen: You’ll have some fun for a change?”) that Allison gave in just so that she could say she’d done it and get her mother to back off.

The group she joined arranged a Sunday brunch gathering of about twenty singles at a local restaurant, and, despite her better judgment, Allison
put on a blue wraparound dress and matching sensibly heeled shoes and headed out.

The storm was unexpected and the rain was biblical in its intensity, hurling sheets of water at Allison’s windshield as she drove into Del Mar to the Italian restaurant she’d never eaten in before. She’d almost turned around and gone home at least three times, once even going as far as to exit the freeway only to loop back once more. But Allison always finished what she started. It was both a saving grace and a tragic flaw.

By the time she’d parked and walked up to the restaurant, her clothing was plastered to her body with rain. The place was steamy and smelled of wet wool and smoke from the wood-burning ovens. It was also loud; a cacophony of clinking plates, silverware, orders, and conversation that seemed to grow with every step she took toward the long banquet table filled with people who looked at least as uncomfortable as she felt. Despite the rain, everyone else was there already, and Allison had to take the last seat at the end of the table bordering the drafty hall that led to the bathroom.

The man sitting next to her had at least ten years on her as well as an emptied beer bottle and a rapidly dwindling mimosa in front of him. He wouldn’t have been bad looking, Allison thought, if not for the spider veins that were already beginning on his face and the paunch he couldn’t quite conceal under his casual blazer.

“So what do
you
do?” he asked her, draining his mimosa.

“I’m a teacher,” Allison told him, hearing the primness in her voice.

“Yeah? Great,” he said and swiveled his head, searching for a server to bring him another drink. “What grade?”

“Third.”

“Nice.” He waved his hand, trying to get somebody’s attention. Nobody was that desperate for a mimosa, Allison thought at the time, no matter how unlubricated the social situation. “You teach around here?”

“In Carlsbad,” Allison said. “Fairly close.” But he wasn’t listening to anything she said; he was too intent on finding someone to bring him another drink. His need infected Allison, making her tense and anxious. She
too began scanning the busy restaurant for a waiter who could help them. “This sucks,” the man said. “I don’t know why they wanted to do this here. You can’t get service to save your life in this place.”

“It seems that way,” Allison said mostly for her own benefit. And at that moment she decided she’d had enough. There was plenty to tell her mother about, including her dangerous drive in the pouring rain and her miserable alcoholic tablemate, and plenty of ammunition to make her mother feel guilty for even suggesting this debacle. She looked up, planning her exit, when she saw Joe for the first time, striding over to her end of the table, and Allison decided to stay put.

Much later, Joe told her that he’d been trying to keep his eye on the table because any party that large needed overseeing, but that he’d been so swamped with the rain, which made all the outdoor seating impossible, he hadn’t gotten a chance to attend to them. And then he saw her and dropped everything. (“Literally,” Joe said later. “I dropped the silverware and napkins I was holding and rushed over to you.”)