The New Neighbor (12 page)

“He’s cute.”

Megan laughs. “Maybe somewhere,” she says. “Under all that hair.”

“Does that happen a lot?” Jennifer asks. “Crushes?”

“Not really. Or if it does I don’t know about it. I can tell with him because—he didn’t do it this time, but usually—he leads around to personal questions, like what do I like to do on the weekends, and as soon as I mention Sebastian he looks a little stricken. It’s exhausting talking to him, trying to be nice without being at all encouraging.”

“I can imagine.”

“He’s a sweet kid. Bright. But . . .” She blows out air like a horse. “I guess I had crushes on professors, even just intellectual ones. But I went to much bigger schools. I didn’t have the same kind of access. I didn’t run into them having lunch.”

“I didn’t go to college,” Jennifer says.

“Oh!” Megan says, clearly shocked, and then to cover her shock she returns quickly to the topic. “Sometimes I get tired of being so recognizable. I long for the anonymity of a big state school. I’d like to be able to swim at the rec center without encountering a student in my bathing suit. I feel like I’m under constant surveillance. And anything could be used against you.
Professor Summerfield was buying prunes! Oh my God, do you think she’s constipated?
I don’t want them sitting in my class thinking about how I’m constipated.” She sighs, then adds, “I’m not constipated.”

“Okay,” Jennifer says.

“I buy the prunes for Ben. He has issues sometimes.” She rolls her eyes at herself. “Not that you needed to know that.”

Jennifer could tell Megan a thing or two on the subject of surveillance. Furtive glances, open hostile stares. The time a woman came up to her in the grocery store, Milo a toddler kicking his heels in the basket, and said—loudly, like she wanted the whole store to hear her—“Someone ought to take that child away from you.” Milo’s face transformed into the look of betrayed astonishment he wore when he got a shot, and Jennifer wanted to round on that woman, wanted to grab the can of tomatoes from her cart and bash in her head. She walked away, whispering to Milo, “Don’t worry, sweetie, she’s a crazy lady,” while behind her the woman called, “It’s shameful that you still have that child. Shameful, shameful, shameful. Imagine what you’re doing to him!”

What about what this woman was doing to him? That didn’t seem to matter. Milo has recently learned the word
hypocrite
, and now he’s trying out the concept. He asks Jennifer: Is my teacher a hypocrite? Is the president a hypocrite? Is Batman a hypocrite? “I don’t think so, honey,” Jennifer answers again and again, but what she really wants to say, is
Yes, yes, yes. They are all hypocrites. There is not a soul who isn’t.

“What about you?” Megan asks. “Do you go in the post office and run into a client? And suddenly they’re, I don’t know, asking you about the kink in their neck?”

“Um,” Jennifer says as the girl at the food counter calls first Megan’s name, then hers. Megan starts to rise but Jennifer waves her down. “I’ll get them both,” she says. Picking up the plates, she lets out a slow breath, banishing the memory of the grocery store woman, for which Megan is not to blame.

When Jennifer sets down the food, Megan looks at her like she’s decided something. “You and I should plan an outing,” she says.

“An outing?” Jennifer repeats.

“Just get away for a day. Or maybe even a weekend. Farther away than Nashville. Have you been to Atlanta?”

“Funny to think of getting away from the getaway.”

Megan sighs extravagantly. “Sometimes you just have to get the fuck off this mountain,” she says. “Breathe some less rarefied air. Let’s go somewhere no one will recognize us.”

Jennifer thinks: I already did.

“Where would you want to go?” Megan asks.

“I don’t think I could go anywhere,” Jennifer says. “I don’t have a sitter.”

“Oh, of course.” Megan produces another of her slow flushes, a blotchy red creeping up her neck. The places the flush doesn’t touch are weirdly fascinating—like someone’s pressed their fingers hard against her throat. Why is she so embarrassed? It’s not as if Jennifer forgets she’s a single parent unless Megan points it out.

Jennifer crunches a bite of salad. She’s surprised by even this hint of dissatisfaction from Megan—
get the fuck off this mountain
. Should she ask if something’s wrong? What if Megan says yes? Yes, something is terribly wrong. Sebastian screams at her and locks himself in the bedroom for hours, Megan sobbing outside the door; Sebastian beds the women of Chattanooga in his photography studio, posing them this way and that. Megan, though—she gets her own back, all her adoring students, those pretty pretty boys. From what she knows of Megan so far, this last notion seems so outlandish that it might as well be impossible, like alien life or time travel, like Megan growing a second head, or Megan’s friend being a murderer. “Did I tell you about Margaret?” she asks abruptly. “My client?”

Megan cocks her head. “I don’t think so.”

“She’s ninety, and she’s a World War Two vet.”

“Really! How interesting.”

“She was a nurse, near the front lines. I’m doing massage for her, but also she’s asked me to . . . help her with her memoir, I guess.”

“About the war?”

Jennifer nods. “We started this morning—she told me a story, I took notes. But I think it’s going to be difficult. She wants to talk about it, but then she doesn’t.”

“What do you think that’s about?”

“I don’t know, the stuff you see in a war.”

“The people she lost.”

“Right.”

Megan reaches over her salad for more pie. “Maybe there were patients she thinks she should have saved.”

“That could be.”

“Everyone who goes to war must have those kinds of regrets.”

Jennifer takes another bite of salad. I had an affair once, she thinks. She thinks it at Megan, but clearly neither is telepathic because Megan just takes another bite of pie. He was one of my clients. Megan! Can you hear me? Megan!

“Oh my God, this is so good,” Megan says. “I can’t believe you’re not eating this.”

“I will, after my salad.”

“If there’s any left.” Megan rolls her eyes at herself. “I have the willpower of a flea.”

The man, the other man, was a regular, someone she thought about mostly, preaffair, as her Tuesday at nine a.m. He spent his weekends and any other time he could get on a bicycle, and the massages were part of his whole cycling lifestyle, along with his shaved calves and the spandex she assumed he wore.

“That’s why I can’t have dessert in the house,” Megan says. “I eat it without even knowing it. I’m at home grading papers and then suddenly I’m in the kitchen with Oreos stuffed in my cheeks.”

“So what?” Jennifer says. “You look great. You’re so skinny.”

“Constant effort, my friend.” She sighs. “Back to the salad.” She playacts an unwilling, listless bite. “Mmm,” she says. “Delicious.”

One Monday afternoon her client called with a weird tension in his voice and said, “I have to cancel our appointment.”

“Do you want to reschedule?” Jennifer asked, already reaching for a pen.

“What I mean is I can’t see you anymore.”

“Oh.” They were both silent, and she considered the quality of the silence, debating whether to ask. “Is something wrong?”

“The truth is,” he said, “I’m too attracted to you.”

That was his reason! She was taken aback. She said she understood, but she didn’t. It wasn’t like this happened every day. She was an under-the-radar person, that was who she was, which was one of the reasons why Tommy had happened in her life like a helicopter landing in a field, why even now she couldn’t bring herself to relinquish his attention.

The next day she went to the client’s house at the agreed-upon time and found him home. He looked so purely astonished to see her that she was unnerved. “But I canceled,” he said.

She summoned her resolve. “I know,” she said.

He was eight years younger than she was and seemed younger still, she assumed because he had no children. He was a grant writer at a small science and technology company. Something to do with mechanical arms. He told her a story once about research on monkeys, monkeys controlling the arms directly from their brains. When she pictured this, she saw a row of monkeys concentrating hard on a row of robot arms, wearing on their temples those electrode things you always see on sci-fi television.

She didn’t ask him many questions about his job. Honestly, she wasn’t that interested. She wasn’t interested in his life before her, in his family grievances or his painful breakups or what was the weirdest sexual thing he’d ever done. She felt a painful embarrassment when he brought up these topics, as if she were thirteen and a parent had just made a dumb joke in public. She liked his body—he was tall and skinny, very different from Tommy, who was all lean slouchy muscles, even now. Sex with him was pleasant and effective. Afterward she was relaxed. It was as if they’d just gone on with their regular appointments, only now he was the therapist. When they couldn’t get together, she felt the sort of disappointed restlessness you endure when your babysitter cancels or a friend texts that she can’t meet you for lunch. She looked forward to seeing him with an anticipation of pleasure, but she never yearned. She never slipped into the backyard with her cell phone because she just had to hear his voice.

It went on like this for a while—six months or so. She and Tommy weren’t really having sex, because she refused when he was drunk and most nights he was drunk. For all she knew he was still getting it elsewhere. She more or less assumed he was. Why couldn’t she just leave him? She heard the question echo inside her head, but nobody ever replied. Zoe was thirteen, then fourteen, dating her first boyfriend, who was sixteen and already driving. Jennifer saw when she met him that he stood just like Tommy—that slouch, that lowered head, that watchfulness disguised as don’t-care cool. Of course. She could barely stand to say hello to him.

What happened was that the other man started to act like he loved her. Alluding to their future. Gazing at her moony eyed. Working up to the question of why she didn’t leave Tommy. “You fight with him a lot, don’t you?” “Your daughter’s not a kid anymore, right? Not really.” “You deserve better than that guy.” In retrospect she sees a connection between this behavior and her own. She grew careless. She didn’t always delete his texts, leaving her phone on the kitchen counter. She went to his house without even bothering to take the massage table. She carried condoms in her purse. She agreed to go out to lunch with him, right in her own neighborhood. One afternoon they went to the movies. There was no one in the theater but a couple people way up in the third row. “Let’s sit in the back and make out,” she said, and he, agreeable boy, was willing.

Even now she can hardly stand to think of it. She had her hand in his pants—
in his pants
—and her mouth was on his mouth, her eyes were closed and he was breathing hard, his breath catching in a way that told her he was close and she was wondering if she had any tissues in her purse, and she heard, “Mom?”

Zoe and her boyfriend had ditched school. “Well,” Zoe said, “I guess I’m not getting in trouble.” Later, when Tommy came home, not even six and already with a buzz on, and Zoe banged her bedroom door open and said, “Mom’s having an affair”—was Jennifer wrong to think that Zoe’s primary emotion was triumph?

But she hadn’t won, poor kid. Not even that story—not even that—could alienate Tommy. He’d cried, in a desperate choking way that made Zoe say, “Daddy, please, I’m sorry, Daddy.” Over and over he said, “This is all my fault.” Limp and wrung out, Jennifer sat in a chair and watched all this, until Tommy dropped to the floor in front of her and, looking up at her with those eyes and those unabashed tears, said, “I’m so sorry, babe,” and then it was her turn to cry. That was Tommy. He literally fell at her feet.

She doesn’t want to think about what it was to give in to Tommy. To stop resisting. Resisting was so hard. Their love was a cobweb and when she fought it she just wound herself tighter. If she stopped fighting—the pleasures of being held that tight! If she thinks about it she misses it, and then she grows angry at herself.

It was after that they conceived Milo, and then things were lovely for a while. Not, of course, with Zoe. What was it Zoe held against her most—the image of her mother with her hand inside a strange man’s jeans? The sight of her father crying? Jennifer thinks it was the fact that Tommy forgave her, which, like all things, must have been Jennifer’s fault.

Later, her ex-lover told the cops she’d once said she wanted Tommy to die, though that wasn’t exactly what she’d said. He’d asked, again, why she didn’t leave Tommy, and she’d tried to explain what she couldn’t explain—she fell in love with Tommy so young, she’d surrendered herself to him.“You can rebel, can’t you?” he said, and his voice was sharp and loud with frustration. “You can leave.”

“You’ve
surrendered yourself
,” she said. “You
can’t
leave because you’d leave yourself behind, and that’s impossible. All I can do is wait for him to die.”

If she’d known what was coming, she’d never have said such a thing. At the time she wasn’t picturing the man in the interview room at the police station, offering his damning paraphrase. She was lying in his bed next to him, with his naked leg pressed against hers, and he’d wanted an explanation, as people always do, and against her better judgment, she’d tried to give him one, and had learned once again that she should have chosen silence. People don’t understand. This is something she needs to remember in the face of Megan’s sympathetic gaze, in the face of her own bifurcated impulse, so very much like Margaret’s: conceal, reveal; reveal, conceal. People don’t ever understand. No one will love us if they know the worst and yet if they don’t know the worst we can’t trust their love. Her whole life the only person who’s ever really known her is Tommy. She wishes she hadn’t told Megan his name. She likes the way Megan’s looking at her now, the charmed affection, the confident assumption of intimacy.
Open as a rose
, Margaret said.
Shining in the light.