By the Way

We sat in the living room over a pitcher of martinis that leaked condensation onto the glass coffee table. You looked fit and relaxed after your trip.

“I feel like a bride,” I said, though we’d been married for 15 years.

You smiled and slid your hand out from under mine as you reached for a cigarette. “How were your roots?” I asked. You’d gone back East to find them.

I won’t be going to the theater or out to dinner or anything like that, you’d promised. I’m going to see my family, all the people who bore you. I’m not going there to have fun, scout’s honor. You’d held up two fingers. It was supposed to be three, wasn’t it? Your tone had been reasonable.

Now, looking puzzled, you repeated, “My roots?” and leaned forward to pick up your martini. “Oh, those,” you said. “Not bad. As a matter of fact, good. Actually, since we’re telling the truth, the trip was great.”

“Who said we’re telling the truth?”

“My goof.”

“How were your Aunt Florrie and Uncle Huck?”

“I didn’t get to see them,” you said after a pause.

“And your brother?”

“I didn’t get to see him either.”

“If I may be so bold, just who did you get to see?”

“This is beginning to feel like an interrogation.”

“You might call it that. Just exactly what did you do if you didn’t ‘get to see’ your family?”

While you were in New York, I’d expected loneliness to creep in and settle on my chest like a vulture. But I was so busy with

Unpacking and enrolling the kids in school that time raced by. At night, I sat in the living room fretting over my decision to come to L.A. You’d accepted a partnership here. The pay was good, the workload was light. I’d lagged behind for 10 months because I wanted the marriage to end on familiar turf. The kids had their friends in San Francisco. The house was familiar. I could have ended it all by doing nothing.

You’d promised that if I sold the house and moved to L.A. we’d spend more time together (though I didn’t quite believe that even an abundance of money and time would change your avoidance of me). I told myself that my decision wasn’t influenced by my fear of loneliness. And so, when you called from Los Angeles to tell me that you’d seen the perfect place in the hills with a pool, a brick barbecue in the kitchen and--this was the clincher--a fireplace in the master bedroom, I put the house on the market and packed up the kids.

You told me reluctantly . . . I had to drag it out of you . . . that you had not “gotten to see” a single relative but had gone out each night to old haunts with our best friends. I felt sick to my stomach, my rage so great that I had to turn it instantly into despair or I would have killed you. I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, forehead in my hands.

Why had I thought it would be any different here? I thought of the line from Emily Dickinson I’d cut out and tucked in my top drawer. “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.”

I felt your hand on my back. “Look,” you said, “I know how this must seem to you. I really did try to see my family, but no one was home. It really is what I went there for.” I let your hand rest there for a while, the warmth of your fingers soothing me. I played back exactly how your voice sounded once when you’d said, “Sometimes I need to get away. Sometimes I feel you’re trying to drag me into this black hole and I’m suffocating.”

“I didn’t really have much fun,” you were saying, “and I really wished you were there with me.” You tugged gently at my hair, pulling my head back so that my eyes were level with yours.

“I just can’t tell anymore. Maybe I am blowing this whole thing out of proportion.”

You left your hand on my shoulder. “Meg and Tom send you a big kiss.”

“How are they?”

“Meg looks the same. Her hair’s a little grayer. But Amy is quite the lady, all grown up with lipstick and eye makeup. No more braces. . . .”

“Did you throw a kiss to the White Horse?”

“In a manner of speaking,” you said, and stubbed out your cigarette.

I tried to keep my jaw from clenching. “What manner?”

“I took Meg and Amy there. Tom had to work late at the office.” You concentrated on extinguishing your already dead cigarette.

“You ate there?”

“Don’t get excited. I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“What does that mean, you didn’t do it on purpose? How can taking Meg and Amy to our restaurant not be on purpose?”

“It was no big thing. It’s just a restaurant.”

I finished the rest of my drink and set the glass down. I sat there awhile with my arms wrapped around my chest, hugging my shoulders. Then I got up and walked over to the windows that framed the backyard like a triptych, the pool embedded like a jewel in the ivy-rimmed patio. Beyond it, past the brick pathway that snaked its way down the manicured hill to the tennis court, I noticed a ball that had lodged in the net and hung there, suspended. I wondered how long it would be before it dropped to the ground of its own weight. Without turning, I said very softly--so softly I wasn’t even sure I’d said it aloud--until you answered.

“Did you sleep with Meg?”

“Why would you say a crazy thing like that?”

“Because . . .” I started, not knowing what words would follow but sensing that they would change everything, would break the stalemate. One word, then another, then another, moving slowly and creakily in my brain like a hamster’s wheel as I crafted my words into a phrase that turned into a sentence, the utterance of which would give me the fleeting sense that I was escaping confinement instead of going around in circles.

”. . . because,” I said, “I slept with Tom when he came to visit us.”

The words came out in one smooth phrase as if I had rehearsed them. They hung there like a skywriter’s banner. If I could have plucked them from the air and stuffed them back in my mouth before you noticed, would I have?

A fly circled noisily overhead, lit on the window in front of me, rubbing its legs together in glee. An airplane crawled across the face of the sun, blocking out the light. I remember that, and the pool sweep whooshing around its perimeter and flinging graceful arcs of water into the air that landed on the hot pavement in staccato splats, sending up hisses of steam. I felt your eyes on my back.

I turned just as you stood, my lips parted to say it was a lie.

“I think I’ll go for a swim,” you said.

That evening, I made your favorite dinner, hoping it might erase what I had said and let us go on as before. A marriage counselor to whom we had gone after you confessed in a moment of drunkenness that you had had eight affairs asked you what I could do to make you happy.

“She never puts the bedspread on the bed,” you had complained.

“And what can he do for you?” she’d asked me.

“He can make love to me.”

At the next session, you’d said, “In our house the meal is officially over after the main course.” You told her about the chocolate cakes your mother used to send you when you were in the Navy.

The next day I had gone to the store and filled the freezer with sweets, and that night, feeling virtuous and anticipatory, I’d placed in front of you a large, chocolatey, whipped cream-topped wedge of something you craved, something I hoped would thaw your frozen parts.

“Not pie. Cake!” you’d said, pushing your plate away with the ball of your thumb. When I flung the pot of rice at you, you’d jumped up to brush the scalding grains from your lap, overturning the dinner table as food and dishes flew and the kids ran out into the quiet suburban street.

This night, you ate my offering wordlessly, washing down the last sweet crumbs with bitter coffee. You chatted amiably with the children without engaging my eyes. I stole looks at your face, searching for some clue as to whether or not you had heard me, some indication of whether or not a corner had been turned. After dinner, you read your newspaper stolidly and impassively. At 10 o’clock you yawned and stretched and said goodnight. I heard the water running in the bathroom. Soon, the light in the bedroom went out.

Later, in the half-light of the room, you on your side of the bed, me on mine, I felt calm. I could see the silhouette of your hip, a dark mammalian shape under the covers. I remembered the nights I’d lain there like this when, bold from too many drinks, I’d eased around you to press my lips and then my cheek against your back, stretching my body the length of yours gently so as not to wake you. And when you had shaken me off once, and once again so that I knew you were awake, I’d gotten up and wandered the house, not knowing what to do to end the silences that went on for 40 days at a time. I had adapted to the thin gruel of deprivation, and there was nothing of me in the face that stared back at me from the dark windows.

My eyes swept the ceiling. Then I let them close and soon, like an after-image etched on the screen of my lids, I watched you turn and tuck the quilt around me, felt the coolness of your thighs against the back of mine, your fingers linking with my fingers, drawing me toward you through the corridor of my dream.

When I woke the next morning, the bed was empty. You had already left for the hospital. I made breakfast for the kids, packed their lunches and sent them off on the school bus. It was 8:30. I noticed that my hand was shaking as I set my coffee cup in the saucer. The newspaper was an alphabet soup of letters. Instead of putting the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, I washed them by hand and toweled them dry before putting them away. I didn’t chase away the skunk, which came each morning with quiet stealth to pilfer the cat’s food, but instead watched him with detached tolerance as he gobbled down her breakfast.

I realized I was waiting for your call.

“Oh, by the way,” I imagined you would say at the end of our chat, “was it true?”

This is how men ask critical questions, saving them for last so that they can bolt if they get an answer that knocks them off guard or humiliates them. If I said it was true, you’d divorce me. If I said it was a lie, we’d stay together for more years of hell. I showered, enjoying the warmth of the water, gave my hair three washings and rinsed it until it squeaked. At 11 the phone rang.

“Meet me for lunch,” you said.

I selected a dress you liked that clung softly to my hips. I checked myself and was satisfied with what I saw in the mirror. Then I broke a Valium in half and swallowed it without water.

The restaurant crackled with conversation. Sleek boats lolled in the marina. Halyards clicked against metal masts and gulls screeched. The day was dazzling. Your eyes dilated slightly when you saw me, you touched my elbow as you guided me through the maze of tables. You ordered drinks. We sat back and waited for the food to arrive.

“How was your day?” you asked.

“I’ll let you know when it’s over,” I may have said.

Lunch came. I nibbled my calamari. You worked on your salad.

“Kids get off to school on time?” you said.

I nodded.

The waitress frowned at the barely touched calamari when she came to clear the plates.

“Was everything all right?”

“Fine,” you replied, heartily.

Eons passed. I waited.

“Oh, by the way,” you said, setting your coffee cup carefully into the saucer.

I focused on your mouth as you spoke, the front tooth slightly snagged so it overlapped the tooth next to it like a comma. Past your shoulder, I saw sun on water, the reflected orb shredded by gusts of wind. The hills, pale and roseate, dipped like enormous dolphins into the bay. I thought how it would feel to be safe somewhere instead of out here in choppy seas, reaching for a thrown rope. I thought about grief. It had no protocol. There were children involved. If I won, they lost. I tried to think of all the innocent things I could say I meant, but my mind wouldn’t give them up to me. Whether I told you it was a lie or whether I told you it was the truth, it would be the same. Choice is a sham, like the Close Door buttons in elevators or the green light buttons at crosswalks, there to give you the illusion of control.

Squinting against the light, your eyes slowly scanned the room, focusing on each group of diners as if you were the grand maitre d’ of the restaurant. A mote of sunlight pierced your glasses and broke into prisms, dappling your cheek. You raised your hand to shield your eyes.

The waitress brought your dessert. You dug in. I felt all at once gravity-less, released from my body. Looking down at the landscape of our marriage, I could see its starkness without anger or sadness--the absences that didn’t add up, the moments of closeness that lasted less than a day before the burden of intimacy drove you elsewhere, the sweet crumbs of affection that I amplified, the cycles of silence. I remembered the times I woke in the middle of the night with the shadow of a scheme for winning back your affection on the sills of my consciousness, and I’d get out of bed very slowly so as not to jar the vision from my head, but it always evaporated when my feet touched the ground.

A small vein pulses in your neck, lifting the point of your collar. Finally, your eyes return from their circuit of the room to my face. Looking down at my hands, I see that my fingertips are white where they rest on the table. You blink once; otherwise your face is impassive. The sky has ombred to copper, burnishing the cluster of islands across the way, and the windows seem ablaze with small fires. A lighthouse beacon blinks its semaphore. A light plane drones. I sit there with my hands in my lap wondering what I will say. Everything seems so quiet, it’s like being underwater; all I can hear is my pulse. Now there is the sound of you clearing your throat. A fly caroms silently from saucer to wineglass to teaspoon, its mica wings quivering.

If it lands on the rim of your cup, I’ll say it was a lie.