Authors: Andrew Porter
And then, for many years, she’d simply stopped questioning these things. She engaged instead in a kind of denial, an elaborate charade, a game of make-believe that Elson and the children had decided to participate in as well. The family meals on Sunday nights, the yearly trips down to Galveston, the daily rituals of sitting in front of the TV and watching the news together. They had grown up inside this routine, had even begun to enjoy it, to take comfort in it, and as long as nobody there decided to break the spell, as long as nobody there decided to point out the simple fact that none of it was real, then it all seemed to work just fine for all of them. Richard and Chloe were in middle school by then and still too young to drive, and so for a while there they had had these years, these precious years when the children were now old enough to talk to them as adults and yet still young enough to be controlled. It was a funny time, she’d realize later, a time that she thought about with both fondness and regret.
It was also during this time that she’d first begun to have thoughts of cheating on Elson, though she’d never mentioned this to anyone, not to Peterson and certainly not to Cheryl. She had never even mentioned it to the men themselves, the men who had made their interest in her clear. One was a colleague of Elson’s from Sullivan & Gordon; another was a man who she had met in her Thursday-night book group. And then there was David Stine, a man who she had sat next to during Chloe’s ballet recitals for several years, a single parent whose daughter was in middle school with Chloe and who had asked her out to lunch on several occasions. She had never actually done anything with David, though she’d thought about him often, and once, after a particularly bad fight with Elson, she had called him up out of the blue and asked him to meet her for a drink. David had agreed, but halfway to the bar, she had chickened out and turned around. A month later, she had found out from a friend that David Stine had been offered a job in Phoenix and never heard from him again.
Later, when they were going through the divorce proceedings, she had taken some pride in the fact that she had never acted on any of her impulses, that she had never technically been unfaithful to Elson, though she had also wondered at times whether this was actually true. I mean, if you thought about cheating, if you actually fantasized about being with another person, then wasn’t that in itself a kind of betrayal? As for Elson, she had always assumed that there’d been other women, though she’d never actually had proof of his indiscretions. It was possible that he’d been faithful to her, too, though the truth was she’d never pursued the matter deeply, had never really wanted to know what she might discover if she scratched beneath the surface of his life. And besides, at that point, Elson had had another mistress anyway, his job, and for a long time she had considered this his greatest infidelity. The long hours he poured into projects, the weekends he spent on site, the lengthy trips he took for out-of-town projects. His heart seemed to be divided three ways, between his children, his job, and her, and for many years she had always felt that, of the three, she had been given the smallest slice, a tiny sliver that he had given to her more out of a sense of duty, or nostalgia, than anything else. And yet she still found herself admiring him at times, still took a certain pride in the fact that he was her husband and that they had managed to keep things together for all these years.
• • •
Still, it wasn’t until later, after the kids had gone off to college and she and Elson were left alone in the house, that she actually began to think about divorcing him. It seemed strange to her now, in retrospect, that she hadn’t thought about it earlier, that it had taken the kids’ leaving for it to even occur to her. And it wasn’t something that had occurred to her all at once, in some grand epiphany. It was something that had snuck up on her gradually, like a secret, during that first semester Chloe was away. She remembered Elson coming home from work one night and sitting across from her at the kitchen table, and she remembered looking at him then as she poured herself some wine and thinking,
I don’t love you anymore, I can honestly say I don’t love you anymore
, and that’s when she’d brought it up for the first time, just kind of mentioned it casually, like she was presenting her latest idea for their next vacation.
What if we just take a break
, she had asked,
some time apart
, and that’s when Elson had stood up and walked out of the room and later driven off in his car to meet Dave Millhauser. When he got home later that night, she apologized and said that she was simply under a lot of stress right now and didn’t mean it, but the question she had posed remained there, lingering between them, and over the next several months she would pose it again on several occasions, when they were driving home from a party one night, when they were sitting over breakfast one morning, when they were lying out by the pool one afternoon sipping drinks. And each time she posed it, Elson would react the same way. He’d stare at her for a long time and then retreat into himself, until finally one night during the fall of Chloe’s sophomore year he had brought it up himself. He had been thinking about it for a long time, he said, and he agreed. There was no animosity in his voice at the time, only sadness, and it was then that she first began to have her own doubts. They were sitting out by the pool late at night, drinking coffee and reading their respective books, and he had just looked at her then and said that all he really wanted was to make her happy, and if getting divorced would make her happy, then that’s what he wanted. Later, there would be ugliness, later there would be painful and contentious disputes over ownership and money, the division of assets, the allocation of funds, and so forth, but at that moment there was simply a strange civility between them, something almost sweet. “I’ve tried the best I could,” Elson had said, standing up and looking at her then, “and apparently I’ve failed.”
And for a long time she would tell herself that he had failed, that
they both had, and yet now, as she walks across her bedroom, her back to Elson, who lies supine on the bed, his naked back a clear reminder of her latest mistake, she wonders if she should have tried a little harder, if they both should have, if she should have maybe given him a little more slack or tried a little harder to forgive him. All she knows now is that she has somehow, for better or worse, let him back in. At some point between the moment he showed up at her door tonight, the moment he showed up in a drunken stupor, holding out a bottle of wine like a peace offering, the moment he pulled her into his arms and embraced her, at some point between that moment and the moment she decided to kiss him, she had let him back in.
It is this that she’s thinking about as she puts on her T-shirt and panties and walks to the bathroom. Outside the house, the neighborhood is quiet and dark, the only sound coming from a distant sprinkler system on somebody’s lawn. She stands at the open window in the bathroom and presses her face against the screen, breathes in the crisp night air, her mind still spinning from the sobering realization that she has just added yet another major problem to her life. After a moment, she goes to the pantry and pulls out the small bag of marijuana that she had confiscated from Richard’s room earlier that day. She fishes out the rolling paper, then starts to roll a joint, staring at her face in the mirror as she does this. The bathroom mirror is warmly lit, a soft amber light that makes her face look younger, maybe ten or fifteen years younger, and as she stares at her face, she thinks about Richard and how she had admonished him earlier that day about the dangers of doing drugs and how he had simply stood there, staring at her, as if to say,
Are you really going to lecture me about bad behavior?
He had come home early that morning, clearly distressed about something that had happened, and he had spent almost the entire day lying on his bed, reading comic books. He used to get this way back in high school whenever he failed a test or whenever he lost a swimming meet. He would always retreat to the world of his youth, to the cluttered shelves of comic books and graphic novels that had once provided him such comfort. But that day it had struck her as strange, even sad, that he would do this, a grown man hiding away in his room, reading comic books. She had tried on several occasions to get him to talk to her, but he wouldn’t, and when she’d later invited him to come downstairs and have a drink with her, he’d told her he had other plans. This distance that
had grown between them in the past year, this strange, ineluctable wall, this intransigent barrier, it seemed to have come from somewhere deep within him, a place she couldn’t name. He had never rebelled back in high school, had always been the perfect model of civility and grace, and yet now, lately, he seemed to have become someone else, another person. She couldn’t describe it, couldn’t put a finger on it, but it was there, and it was very real. Sometimes it struck her as sad that this had happened, and often she missed their closeness, their long conversations, the way he used to confide in her about everything, the way she used to go to his swimming meets back in high school, and the way he used to always wave to her right before his race, and the way that afterward they would always go out to dinner together, just the two of them, and talk for hours on end. Back then, back in high school, he had come out to her long before he had ever come out to his friends, or even to Chloe. For a long time it had only been she and Chloe who knew, and they had talked about it a lot, the three of them, over dinner, while Elson was off on a project or staying late at work. She had almost wanted to remind him of that this evening as he came down from his room, freshly showered and off to a party, but instead, she had brought up the pot and held it up before him, held it up like a cruel reminder of his recent failures, and he had simply looked at her and then shrugged and walked out the door.
Now, pressing the joint to her lips and lighting it, she feels her own hypocrisy, feels the sudden weight of her own admonitions. They had brought up their children in a world of excess, after all, in a world of wild parties and late-night drinking, and so why should she be surprised that they had embraced this world themselves? She sits down now on the toilet and stares out the window, fans the smoke in that direction. She thinks of Elson asleep in the other room, oblivious to her indiscretions, sleeping happily in her bed. Shortly after Richard had left for his party, Elson had shown up with his wine, and though she had worried about Richard returning, she had let him in anyway. To say that she was thinking at all at that moment would be a lie. What had happened between them had happened out of instinct and out of recklessness and out of fear. It didn’t mean a thing that she had kissed him in the kitchen or that she had led him up to her room and allowed him to undress her. And it didn’t mean a thing, now, that he was lying in her bed, or that she was hiding away in the bathroom, smoking her son’s pot. If you could account for human
behavior with simple explanations, a man like Peterson would be out of a job, and yet there was no explanation for what she was doing now, for the way she had allowed her daughter’s absence to turn her into the type of person who hid away in bathrooms at three in the morning, doing drugs.
Outside the door, she can hear movement now, the sound of footsteps on the floor, a drawer being opened, then shut. She drops the joint between her knees, then flushes, then stands up and turns on the shower fan, pushing the smoke upward toward the vent, then outward toward the open window. A moment later, she hears her name being called, Elson’s groggy voice saying something about the heat and whether or not she had turned it on. Then there’s knocking at the bathroom door, a soft, hesitant knock, and this time she answers.
“Just give me a minute,” she says, feeling suddenly panicked.
There’s a long silence, then Elson says, “I smell pot.”
“What?”
“Are you smoking pot in there?”
She moves toward the window and makes another dramatic motion with her arms, fanning the smoke and feeling suddenly caught. She doesn’t answer.
“Cadence.”
“Just give me a second.”
“Jesus Christ, Cadence. What the hell are you doing in there?”
Realizing now that she’s caught, she doesn’t answer. She thinks of telling him to go away, to go back home, but she doesn’t. Instead, she just tells him to go back to bed and that she’ll join him in a second.
There’s another long silence, then Elson says, almost gently, “Are you okay?”
“What?”
“Are you okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“Our daughter’s gone missing, Cadence, and you’re sitting in the bathroom smoking pot, so what I’m wondering is whether or not you’re okay.”
There’s no scorn in his voice now, no disapproval, just genuine concern. She thinks of answering him honestly, but doesn’t.
“Why don’t you just open up the door,” he says. “Okay? Just open it up and we can talk.”
But when she looks at the door, it seems at that moment too far a distance
to go. The ramifications of opening that door are simply too great, and so she just sits there, staring at the wall.
Finally, she says, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Why did you come here tonight?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, of all the places you could have gone tonight, why did you come here?”
“Because I missed you,” he says, “because I wanted to be with you.”
“That’s not the truth, Elson,” she says. “Please. Just tell me the truth. This is important, okay. Why did you come here tonight, honestly?”
There’s another long pause, and then he says, very softly, “I don’t know.”
IT IS AN ATYPICALLY QUIET NIGHT
at Beto’s. At the far end of the blue-lit pool, three boys float languidly on their backs, like corpses, and above him he can hear the gentle slapping of palm fronds in the wind. Someone is playing an early eighties dance mix in the cabana house, and there is the occasional sound of laughter and applause. He leans back drunkenly on his small chaise longue chair at the edge of the pool and tries to avert his eyes from the man who has been talking to him for the past half hour. High on something, this man is telling him about his failed acting career, about how he should have never left L.A., about all of the major roles he’d almost had. He lists off the names of various actors and movie directors that Richard has never heard of, talks about parties at their houses, lunches with their agents, the endless series of broken promises and duplicitous dealings. But still, the man says, he should have never left L.A. It had been a mistake. He realizes that now. But wasn’t that the thing about life, the cruel irony of it? Once you made a mistake, you couldn’t take it back, and Richard nods, thinking suddenly of the man he’d met at the Hyatt Hotel, the only significant thing in his life he’d ever regretted.