To Jared’s credit, he mulled that one over. “The difference,” he said at last, “is of degree. It’s too much, it seems out of the ordinary.”
He was right. That’s what it was. Out of the ordinary.
Larissa rushed to Pingry in the morning to sit with Sheila and Leroy and line by line edit
Much Ado
down to high school production size, chewing the pencil between her teeth, mindful of the time, ten, eleven, nearly noon.
“I gotta run, guys,” she finally said.
“But we’re not done!”
“Can you finish up? You have some very good ideas. Just a couple of things: Sheila, don’t cut too many of Don Pedro’s lines; he is after all the conscience of the play. And Leroy, same goes for Benedick, who is the hero. Even in a comedy that role is given some prominence.”
“Um, did I cut something you didn’t want me to?” asked Leroy, sensing a rebuke.
“I’m thinking you should probably keep the line when Benedick says,
All hearts in love speak their own tongue
,” Larissa said with a smile, counting out the beats before she could bound out of doors. “But otherwise you’re doing great. See you tomorrow.” My merry day isn’t long enough despite what Shakespeare says, she thought, seeking comfort in math, 5.2 miles in twelve splendid minutes.
She was a few minutes past crisp and windy March noon when she found her Jag in the drive, but Kai not in it. Did he leave already? She saw the back gate by the garage ajar and when she walked around the side of the house to the back, she found Kai chasing Riot all over her yard.
“He was barking at me,” Kai said, running up to her, panting. “I petted him, but he clearly had other things in mind. Not a very ferocious dog, is he?”
“No,
she
isn’t,” said Larissa. “She is a mashed potato. She would show you to the good silver if we had any.”
“Come on,” he said, even the whites of his teeth teasing her, “you must, in that house. What’s her name anyway?”
“Riot. Like you, we thought she was a boy.”
Riot was bumping Kai’s knees with her head, having brought the three-foot stick back. Kai wrested it away, threw it for her, and then chased her across the yard, yelling, “Riot! Give it! Give it back!” It was Riot’s favorite game. Pretending to fetch the stick and then being chased by a human for it. She could play it all day. How did Kai instinctively know this? Seeing him run after her dog in her back yard, like a carefree kid, filled Larissa with a troubling heaviness on this blustery day, like the new leaves were clogging up the drains of her heart.
“Hey, you want a lemonade?” Did she even have lemonade?
“How about ice water?”
She left him with Riot and went into her kitchen. As she fixed him a glass, she watched him from the window. There was such young joy in his movements.
He came in flushed and perspiring. “What am I going to do with my shirt?” he said. “I look like I’ve been rolling in it.”
He took the drink from her hands, gulped it down, chewed the ice. “We never had a dog,” he said. “We lived in an apartment; hard to keep a dog in the apartment. But I love dogs.”
“Clearly they also enjoy your company.” Riot was standing on her back paws at the door, banging on the screen with her front paws, as if to say,
Get back out here, wimp
.
“What a great dog.” Kai drummed on the counter, looking around Larissa’s kitchen.
She stood in her quiet house, around her clean black granite and white cabinets and watched him get his work face back. He was usually so composed; now suddenly he was panting. There was something vulnerably undeniably human about it.
“Well, the nav looks pretty good. Have you seen it?”
“No, I came straight in the back.”
“You want me to show you how to use it?”
“Sure.”
“Come,” he said. “Because I’ve got to start heading back. I have an appointment at one. What time is it?”
“Twelve thirty.”
“Yeah, I gotta run. Normally I don’t schedule anything for lunch, but this is a sure sale, the widowed sixty-year-old man wants to buy a Jag for his thirty-year-old girlfriend.”
“Isn’t that a bit of an overkill?”
Kai grinned naughtily. “How else,” he said, “is he going to get her to sleep with him?”
And in the afternoon Larissa stood in front of the mirror in the front hall, staring severely into her face, into her eyes, while the ice cream melted in the plastic bags, still in the trunk of her Jag. A small thing that might eventually be noticed by the discerning youngest members of her family, those who enjoyed eating ice cream. Mom, they might say, why does the ice cream always taste like it’s been melted and refrozen? Why are you bringing home melted ice cream? How long is the drive from King’s, Mom? Isn’t it just four minutes? Does ice cream melt this fast? What are you doing with your afternoons that you need to keep standing in front of the mirror while our precious ice cream turns to heavy cream?
One thing Larissa did not do as the ice cream pooled on her Jaguar floor was write to Che.
Dear Che, help me
. How do I extricate myself from this awful thing I’m falling into, a thing made geometrically more awful by the stark truth of it: I don’t even write you this so-called letter asking for instructions on self-extrication. I rationalize it away like a college grad, a slightly mocking adult who can reason. I say, how in the world is Che going to help
me
? She can’t even help herself with Lorenzo. That’s what I
say
. But the real reason I can’t write to you is
because I don’t want to, and that’s worse even than sitting in the car, the knowledge of my unashamed and actualized self. I
know
that all I want is for one o’clock to come, to be upon me faster, so I can see his face, so I can hear his laughing, teasing voice speak to me I don’t even know of what—masonry? Luxury cars? Funerals? I don’t know. I don’t care. I barely listen. Sitting next to him is what I listen to. The leather and Dial soap and denim smell of him in my car, twenty, unmarried, childless. When I look at him, I’m not in the middle of my life but at the very beginning, one of the Great Swamp Revue traveling Jersey in search of a stage, a joke, a performance, something real amid the illusion, or is it an illusion amid all things real? The Jersey Footlight Players is what I am part of again, putting on quite a show on that stage that’s the driver seat of my Winter Gold Jag, and that’s the sordid
why
I haven’t written you since February. I’m afraid that in my shallow words you will hear the profound truth of what’s happening to me. I’m drawing away from you as I’m drawing nearer the black chasm that’s got him in it, slowly realizing, reluctantly admitting that he is the only thing I want.
8
Auditing Safeguards
T
he navigation purchase did not ease its way into Jared’s full comprehension over the next few days, and on Saturday night, when they had gathered with their friends for dinner at the house, Jared brought it up again.
Maggie immediately exclaimed, “Jared! That’s what I said to her! Explain yourself, Larissa, to your friends and your husband. It makes no sense.”
“Why
do
you need a nav system, Lar?” asked Ezra.
“It. Was. An. Impulse. Buy.” Larissa shot Jared a look that she hoped conveyed that if he wanted a woman tonight it would have to be one other than his wife.
“I understand,” said Ezra. “But it’s like you listening to someone else’s stage direction. It’s just so out of character.”
“Perhaps I’m playing a different character.”
She and Jared had a fight instead of sex that Saturday night. Larissa was upset with him for embarrassing her, and he said, “Embarrassing
you
? Well, let me ask you, how do you think I feel when Ezra says to me earlier tonight, hey man, can’t believe your wife finally agreed to direct the spring play?”
“So? You’re
embarrassed
by that?”
“Not by that!” he shouted. Jared never shouted. “But you never told
me
.”
Why did she look so surprised by this? As if she hadn’t realized she hadn’t told him. “It just happened, Jared. It wasn’t like I was keeping it from you. It happened two days ago. Three.”
“It happened on Monday, and today is Saturday—night—and this is the first conversation you and I are having about it.”
“If you can call this a conversation.”
“It’s more words than we’ve had about it for a week!”
“A couple of days!”
“Stop it, Larissa. I know when I’m being bullshitted.”
“Jared, you were home late on Monday, on Tuesday we had Emily’s cello, on Wednesday, I don’t even know. I wasn’t hiding it.” She stammered a little, then recovered.
“Did it slip your mind?”
“Yes. It slipped my mind. What’s the big deal?”
“Larissa, what’s the big
deal
? It’s only been the sole topic of conversation between you and Ezra the past two months.”
“Come on, not the sole topic…”
“Ezra didn’t tell it to me like it was news,” Jared said. “He mentioned it to me, as in, isn’t it great that Larissa is doing this. Why would you not tell me?”
“I forgot!”
“You forgot? Like you forgot to tell me about the nav system?”
“Oh, cut it out! Just stop it. I didn’t tell you because I thought you’d be upset, okay? We had decided I wouldn’t take the position, and then I did.”
“So which is it, Larissa? Did it slip your mind, or did you deliber ately not tell me? Let’s not mix up the lamest of your excuses.”
She breathed in and out deeply, like she was training for a scene. “You’re upset.”
“You’re so observant. Why didn’t you talk to me about it first?”
“You told me to take the play if I wanted to! Remember?
Those were your words. Take it if you want, Lar. Now suddenly I have to call you on Monday morning about it!”
“You could’ve told me Monday night, no?”
“No! Leroy was about to cast auditions for
Godot
! It was an emergency.”
“What does that have to do with Monday night?”
“Immediate action was required.”
“Immediate action, yes. But immediate secrecy?”
“Oh, for God’s sake! What are you more upset by, Jared? That I agreed to do it, or that I didn’t tell you?”
“So many things I can’t name them all.”
“Which one would you like to deal with first?”
“None of them, Larissa. Not a single fucking one.” And then a second later: “How about this one? Why would you keep these things a secret from me?”
“How can it be a secret? I was the one who told you!”
“Not about the play.”
“No,” she conceded. “But about the nav.”
“Oh, so now we’re parsing our secrecy, are we?”
“Oh God!”
“And you could hardly keep the nav hidden, could you?”
“I had no intention of keeping it hidden!”
“Your car,” Jared continued, “was not in the garage when I came home. You had to ‘splain that one somehow. And now you’re going to be spending all your time at Pingry. What do you intend to do with our children?”
“Do not be so melodramatic. I have Sheila, I have Leroy. Fred, Ezra. I have my line reader. We’ll be fine.”
“Fine and dandy. You’ll know how to get to Pingry. You’ll have your navigation system, won’t you?”
Without resolution Jared was confounded all Sunday. He felt as if there was a piece of the puzzle he was missing, but he
didn’t know what the piece was. He didn’t even know there had been a puzzle! Now suddenly there were missing pieces in it. What was the thing that grated on him, in the scheme of things, in the whole tapestry? He didn’t care if Larissa decided to direct a play. If it worked out, great. And he didn’t really care about the nav system, though he certainly didn’t think it was money well spent. But if she wanted it, then she should have it. No, there was something else niggling him, feeling not right to him. Was it something about Larissa, something about her boots? No. Her jeans? No. Her made-up face, her styled hair? Her smile, the details of the hastily prepared dinner, of Michelangelo’s drawing lying on the floor in the mud room instead of being hung up on the fridge? Something wasn’t quite right…like a razor blade in Jell-O.
But then on Monday, Prudential’s second quarter results showed a drop in revenue of twelve percent, and Jared spent the day going over every department’s budget after a directive to cut costs by a commensurate twelve percent; the conservation of assets required his direct participation in every facet of revenues, expenditures, and payroll and took his every available brain molecule. To implement the short-range goal of resolving the unknowable mystery that was his complicated yet complete marriage to Larissa required strategy and planning, but all week he developed projects and programs that lowered the operating costs of a multi-billion-dollar business. Analyzing cash flow and pinpointing weak investment product lines took all his time and his mental resources. A week passed.
The second week was all about the auditing safeguards. With the personal tax liability deadline looming, he stayed at work till seven or eight at night to enact guidelines that would make an audit by the Treasury Department not frightening but welcome. He welcomed the transparency of a more streamlined organization, the diversification of the company’s assets into
other ventures around New Jersey that masked some of the heavy tax burden the company was carrying. This was no small undertaking. And no one knew New Jersey’s financial regulatory statutes better than Jared. The company depended on him and he would not let them down. By the time the crisis at work was averted—by him—and costs were brought under control, he tried once again to reach for the bug that had niggled him, but it was gone. And at home, Larissa was her old smiling, cooking, pleasant self, the kids were dressed, homework was done, chores, TV, everything ticked along smoothly. It was just an aberration, Jared said to himself, after she had apologized yet again for forgetting to tell him about the play, about the stupid navigation. He had been anxious about other things and took it out on her. Filled with remorse, he had bought her something extra beautiful for her birthday on April 4, a white gold necklace with her name etched in diamonds. “Does this mean we have to give the car back?” she said. “Because technically you already gave me a birthday present.”