Infidelity (3 page)

( CHAPTER SIX )

“Everything okay, honey?” Aaron called from the other side of the bathroom door.

Ronnie stood at the sink, staring down at the store-bought test, its single blue line stating what she knew already. She tossed it in the wastebasket.

“Yeah, I'm fine.”

“Is there news?” Aaron was leaning against the other side of the locked door in anticipation.

“No news. I'll be down in a sec to help with dinner.”

“Oh.”

A pause. Neither of them moved, the reality of another negative test sinking in.

“I'll be down in a sec, okay?”

“Are you okay?” Aaron offered, despite the fact that he himself was clearly wounded.

“I said I was fine. What do you want to eat?”

“Honey, I'm sorry.”

“Aaron, please.”

“We can just reheat some leftovers. It's fine.”

Ronnie and Aaron had been trying to have a baby for a few years. In reality, it was more an unspoken agreement that they wouldn't try
not
to have a baby. And, like most things in their lives, the fact that it wasn't working was also mostly unspoken. Additionally unspoken was the idea that the ill health of Ronnie's youth had left her insides unpredictable, though the doctors couldn't find any concrete reason why she couldn't conceive. Ronnie wasn't even sure she wanted a baby, but she knew that not being able to have one left her feeling like a failure. Aaron's constant lingering outside the locked bathroom door certainly did not help.

“You know, maybe it's time we talked to someone,” Aaron called from the hallway. “People do it all the time, you know.”

“I know they do. I just don't want to.”

“But why? If it's going to help.”

“I just don't want to. Not yet. Okay?” She listened to the sound of his feet finally padding off to the kitchen and exhaled a heavy sigh.

Despite the five years they had been together, Aaron and Ronnie had never bothered to get married. Aaron had always assumed that Ronnie was the type of girl who didn't care about white weddings and gift registries, and Ronnie assumed that Aaron would never ask. Because of this they had settled into a life that lazily assumed they would be together until death.

Ronnie washed her hands and splashed some water on her face before joining Aaron in the kitchen. He had a familiar look of concern on his face but said nothing, pulling a plastic-wrapped lasagne pan from the fridge and preheating the oven.

She generously put her hand on his shoulder, a gesture of reconciliation that he welcomed. “Listen. We'll try for a few more months and then I'll go, okay?”

Aaron smiled. “You sure?”

“Yes, but let's not talk about it until then, okay?”

“Okay. I promise.” He turned and kissed her on the forehead, and then returned his attention to the lasagne pan.

Ronnie sat down at the kitchen table. Ramona, their hyperactive, rescued Rottweiler, ambled up to her and leaned against her knee, staring upwards with the expectation of a cookie. Ronnie thought about how they had moved into their two-bedroom first-floor apartment in Parkdale under the unspoken assumption that the second bedroom would one day be painted pink or blue or yellow. How as they had slept-walked into their late twenties, and then into their early thirties, breeding became a given, given that everyone else in their lives was doing it.

Aaron and Ronnie travelled in a circle of friends who lived their lives like they were collecting Monopoly cards. The baby card would complete the set. A natural progression that at first would come eventually and then would come immediately. No questions asked. Ronnie was not entirely sure who had made this decision, it was simply one that had happened, that had been expected, and it didn't seem entirely negative, so she has been swept along with it without question.

Ronnie watched as Aaron began rummaging around in the fridge for the components of a salad. She staved off a sudden urge to cry, knowing that her disappointment was not connected to an inability to get pregnant but rather to her constant ability to disappoint, even when she was doing everything in her power not to.

I don't even know how to be a real woman. I can't make a casserole and I can't even breed.

Recently, during a routine examination, her doctor had found some wayward cells, tiny suspect growths that glowed white when her cervix was dosed with vinegar and lit up on the gynecologist's table. Ronnie was told it was nothing to be worried about, that it was “common for women to experience cervical changes.” But the tests were scheduled and the biopsies performed, with bright-eyed med students mumbling covertly and thoughtfully pointing at the coloured blob on the television screen in the examination room. Ronnie clung to the word “routine” and stared at her endless stream of negative pregnancy tests and felt very little.

The occasional late-night Google search, fuelled by red wine and morbid curiosity, revealed that worry was something she was allowed to do if she really wanted to. She shared little news with Aaron, his interest in her body parts driven by pleasure and production rather than any vague indication of possible tragedy. Aaron was particularly good at convincing himself and those around him that there was nothing to be worried about, even when there was. Because of this Ronnie had learned to disregard him when judging the severity of the situation.

It was for this reason she would come to enjoy Charlie's ability to overreact to everything. As much as it irritated most of the people around him, his fear of catered food, his panic over misshapen moles and acid-reflux-as-heart-attack charmed her, made her feel like life was much more precarious and therefore valuable than Aaron's stoic nature suggested.

“Maybe it's stress,” Aaron said, serving the reheated lasagne onto mismatched plates.

“What do I have to be stressed about?” she asked.

“Well, you seem a little absent lately. Somewhere else.”

Ronnie poured herself a glass of Merlot and shook her head. She enjoyed drinking wine immediately after a pregnancy text.

“Really, Aaron, I'm fine. We'll just keep trying. These things take time. That's what everyone tells me,” she said unconvincingly.

The truth was she was tired of the econo-box of pregnancy tests always under the bathroom sink, the strategic fucking at odd hours, and the hopeful looks from Aaron in those few days before her period. Every month he would ask if she was late with an embarrassing glee that made Ronnie slightly nauseated. It bothered her that he knew her cycle well after years of tracking it carefully and yet asked the question regardless. She had often contemplated going on the pill without telling him, but there seemed to be no point given how barren she now believed herself to be.

“It's okay, sweetie,” Aaron offered, lightly putting his hand on Ronnie's arm. “Maybe next time. There's always next time.”

During a five-minute conversation at a party in the Annex Ronnie suddenly became unsure about the blind path she was on. She was keenly aware that decisions had been made for her most of her life. By doctors and lovers and family. That she had failed to fight those decisions all the way to that two-bedroom apartment and that negative pregnancy test in the bathroom wastebasket.

And in the week since meeting Charlie she hadn't slept with Aaron once.

It wasn't that she no longer wanted a baby, it was that she wasn't really sure she wanted Aaron's baby.

“Really, Aaron. I told you. I'm fine.”

( CHAPTER SEVEN )

The letter arrived in the mailbox of Ronnie and Aaron's Parkdale apartment a few days after the reading at the library. Soon it would be Christmas Eve, so Ronnie assumed it was another holiday card from a family member she'd never heard of, one of Aaron's many cousins, aunts, or uncles who were always calling and asking when the baby was coming or when they'd get an invite to the wedding.

It came in a creamy white envelope and in grand, looping handwriting was addressed to Veronica Kline, care of Aaron's catering company, Indulge Catering, a name Ronnie had always found amusing given it seemed Aaron had never indulged in anything in his life. An office address at the university, without a name, was printed in Helvetica on a white label in the corner.

It was bold for Charlie to send a letter to Ronnie and Aaron's shared apartment, and Veronica felt a surge of panic and guilt as she sat down at the kitchen table to read it.

Dear Veronica,

It was lovely to meet you the other evening. You owe me a cookie. Why don't you come by my fancy brand new office when I move in next month? Bring a bottle of peach schnapps.

Charles

P.S. I have just remembered that Montgomery Clift was gay and his relationship with Elizabeth Taylor . . . although deep and meaningful and lifelong . . . was platonic, so I have changed my mind about wanting to be him.

There was no phone number anywhere on the letter or envelope, a deliberate omission, she thought, for discretion and safety, meaning that she would have to take her chances and simply show up unannounced one day.

Ronnie glanced at the brand new kitten and puppy calendar affixed to the fridge with alphabet magnets and noted how many days it was until “next month.”

When Aaron came home that evening she gave him a hug and a kiss as soon as he came through the door.

“What's with you?” he asked, smiling.

“Nothing. I just wanted to let you know I missed you,” she lied.

( CHAPTER EIGHT )

The week between Christmas and the New Year was frantic. Suffocating. Claustrophobic.

Ronnie made three batches of shortbread cookies for her in-laws that they took a few bites of and pretended to like. Charlie had sugar cookies made for him. He ate all twenty-four in twenty-four hours. Tamara commented on how he'd gained weight that year. Charlie retaliated by commenting that Tamara had gained weight that year. Noah destroyed the gingerbread house on display in their living room with his fists and had to be wrestled away from it screaming. Ramona ate one of Aaron's two Cornish game hens, fresh from the oven and stolen from the kitchen counter, made for their quiet Christmas dinner at home. Aaron asked Ronnie to change out of what she was wearing and into something more “appropriate” before they went to his parents' house for a second, less quiet Christmas dinner. Ronnie called Aaron a jerk under her breath, which Aaron heard but pretended he didn't. Noah tore open over a dozen presents until he got bored and abandoned them all for a drink coaster he refused to let go of. Tamara drank too much eggnog after Noah had gone to sleep and told Charlie he needed to support his family and “man up.” Charlie drank too much Scotch after Noah had gone to sleep and told Tamara she didn't understand his needs. Tamara threw up too much eggnog and Charlie found the sound of her heaving in the bathroom oddly satisfying. Aaron ate too much turkey and fell asleep on the couch of his parents' house while Ronnie faced numerous questions from them about her failure to breed. To escape, Ronnie locked herself in the bathroom of Aaron's parents' house and re-read Charlie's letter three times. Charlie locked himself in the bathroom of his in-laws house and had a panic attack. Later, Noah locked himself in the same bathroom and started screaming while Charlie's father-in-law tried to jimmy the lock with a Bay card. When Noah didn't stop screaming, Charlie escaped quietly through the garage to go for a walk to think about Ronnie, smoking a joint he'd hidden in the billfold of his wallet. While Charlie was walking and thinking it snowed. After fifteen minutes Tamara called him on his cellphone while he was high in the middle of the suburbs in the snow and asked him where the fuck he was. He could hear Noah screaming in the background. Hearing her in-laws argue from just beyond the bathroom door, Ronnie folded up the letter and counted the days until “next month” over and over again in her head.

( CHAPTER NINE )

The day Charlie started his writer-in-residency at the University of Toronto he found that he was nervous in much the same way children were nervous before the first day of school.

Tamara made him a leftover ham sandwich in the kitchen, wrapping it carefully in wax paper before slipping it into a brown paper bag, an act that only made his fears seem all the more childish.

“Really, Charlie. You'll be fine. Do you want to play the worst-case scenario game? Like you do with your therapist?”

Her voice was soothing, but Charlie felt anxiety rise painfully within him as he gripped his coffee mug. He tried various techniques to assuage it, fending off a full-blown panic attack with feeble breath exercises and positive thoughts that were quickly stamped out by terror.

“Why did I agree to do this?” he asked Tamara weakly while she packed files into her bag. He sat down at the kitchen table and put his head in his hands.

“Because it's good for us,” she said, kneeling on the linoleum in front of him. She kissed him softly, stood up, and then pulled him to his feet. “Now come on, you're going to be late.”

Charlie had been given a small office space and a meagre stipend under the condition that he did the occasional talk and spent at least a portion of his afternoons greeting eager young faces, each of them hoping that their thinly veiled memoirs would one day become bestsellers. Upon the invitation, Charlie had resisted the idea completely, but Tamara had a way with guilt that made saying no impossible.

“It's a terrible fucking idea.”

“It's money, Charlie,” she had said, her eyes wide with the kind of pleasure that only came with past disappointment.

He loathed the idea of it, but yes, money—something he had failed at acquiring most of his life, more specifically during his marriage (which, to be fair, was most of his life), something that had been a mostly unsaid but occasionally poked at sore spot since Noah's illness consumed their lives.

“I'm not good with people,” he objected as she tried to usher him out the front door.

“You're fine with people. You're the only one who doesn't think so. You just convince yourself you're not. You know you're supposed to try these things. That's how you get better at them,” she responded. The comment was intended to be supportive, but could only be read as patronizing.

Tamara had been participating in this scenario most of their marriage. Charlie would be terrified of something mundane and Tamara would talk him into and through it. She was skilled at being the stereotypical writer's wife, relished it really.

“And it's good for your career. It'll give you the time to write and will raise your profile,” she said optimistically.

Charlie loathed the word “profile.”

He felt his profile was a constant, unending work in progress that rarely amounted to anything. He had published books to wide acclaim, but he was still relatively anonymous, able to walk down the street without being recognized by the general public. There was the occasional five-figure book prize or grant, and an annual three-figure royalty statement, and Tamara had sacrificed herself to a fifty-hour workweek as a result. Being beloved by critics and intelligent readers didn't automatically mean financial security or fame (in fact, generally the contrary), and hiring Amanda to take care of Noah, the special schools and therapists for him, were costly. Someone with a less-selfish demeanour would have to foot the bill. Charlie was too temperamental, neurotic, and unpredictable to sacrifice anything. It was also those characteristics that had consistently prevented him from holding down a day job.

Tamara held out the brown paper bag in front of him in a final effort to get him on his way. “Do you want me to write your name on the bag?” she asked, grinning.

“Stop it.”

“You know you're just being silly.”

“It's different for you. You love your job.”

This was true, but Tamara was always too quick to mention that he got to lounge around and drink Merlot with writer-types while she worked through spreadsheets into the wee hours. Every time the furnace failed or the porch needed repair, she would sigh noisily and ask Charlie if he was “planning to take on something paid anytime soon.” That meant teaching or ghost writing or something equally insufferable, and Charlie obliged until the bills were paid up.

Charlie dreaded the writer-in-residence position because he despised young people, with their dreams and aspirations and smooth cheeks like baby's asses. Their youth and vigour and sexual appetites left him feeling inadequate, impotent, and the notion of being around them enough to teach them anything was horrifying. Even the occasional crush bestowed upon him by a pretty young thing was certainly not enough for him to tolerate things.

The guilt that accompanied Tamara's snide remarks only increased when Veronica started to consume Charlie's thoughts. Despite the fact it had been a few weeks since he had seen her in the back of the room at his reading (since she had promptly run away from him before he could get close enough to smell her, touch her again), he had thoughts about her daily. He tried to burn an image of her into his memory from only those two brief moments. Enough time had passed that he had managed to fictionalize her completely—what she wore, how she spoke, what she did for a living, what she liked to eat, what music she liked, and of course, what she looked like naked. He would watch his wife sleep, gaze at the folds of flesh that came with age and that gathered around her chin and under her arms, and he would promise himself he would try to put Ronnie out of his thoughts, that he would not see her again, that his life was good and Ronnie would only cause problems. He promised himself it would go no further than his fingertips on the inside of her thigh at a crowded Christmas party.

The feel of the inside of that thigh had been something he had most certainly memorized. It was enough fodder to allow him to pleasure himself in the shower behind a locked door.

He reminded himself that he loved Tamara over and over again, while they ate meals together or went to parties together. Their life together was largely good, much better than most imagined, thanks to the struggle that was Noah's unpredictable mental state.

It was good. It was good enough.

And he would be good in return.

Tamara fixed the collar on Charlie's jacket and again kissed him softly on the mouth. “Now go. You're going to be late.”

“Okay. I'll see you at dinner. Are we still having those godawful friends of yours over?”

“Indeed we are. Oh, and Charlie?”

“Yes, dear?”

“I'm really proud of you. You know that, don't you?”

Yes, Charlie knew that. But he was no longer sure that it mattered.

Noah had recently begun writing numbers on the backs of things with a blue ballpoint pen.

It had started with paper—receipts, coupons, five-dollar bills that he would find on countertops and in drawers.

The numbers always seemed random, pointless, meaningless. The doctor told Tamara and Charlie to expect randomness in his behaviour, that it was nothing to worry about. It was normal, or rather normal for abnormal.

They allowed it because, although annoying, it seemed relatively harmless. They allowed it because the doctors told them repeatedly, “You should go to the place where he lives instead of expecting him to come to you.” Come to normal. The numbers, the organization, it seemed to settle him down. Scrawling numbers on everything prevented him from screaming. Seemed to solidify his need for order.

His debilitating need for order.

Charlie would come home and Amanda would apologize profusely.

“He wrote on your books today, Mr. Stern. The ones in your office. I'm sorry, but I know you asked me not to stop him,” she said, exhausted.

“It's all right. I understand.”

“He could only really reach the first three shelves, so I moved as many as I could. I tried to pick out the more valuable ones.”

Charlie noted when he went to survey the damage that Amanda had not moved any of the books he himself had written, multiple copies of poetry collections littering the floor with Noah's childish scrawl all over them.

Over time the numbers got higher.

What started as one- and two-digit numbers written on the back of takeout menus and Canadian Tire money grew into four- and five-digit numbers written on the bottoms of mugs and the undersides of tables.

One day Charlie came home to find that Noah had written 387 on the back of the television with a Wite-Out pen he'd found in Tamara's desk drawer.

Then it was 586 on the cushion of the recliner in marker.

Around this time Tamara stopped inviting guests over. Although she was generally calm and flexible, given years of dealing with Charlie's neurosis, she was quite proud of domestic order and her ability to keep house. She loved Noah, but his ongoing defacing of their belongings was a source of embarrassment that caused her to move her monthly book club meeting elsewhere.

“Maybe we should put plastic on the furniture,” she said to Charlie one night over dinner.

“Don't be absurd,” he replied.

“I'm only looking for solutions. It's not absurd to want to find a solution.”

“This is the way it is. We have to learn to accept it.” Charlie enjoyed being the rational one for once, while Tamara gazed mournfully at their pristine beige microfibre sectional.

Another time Charlie awoke from a nap in front of the television to Noah carefully scrawling 869 on his thigh with a Sharpie.

From there it just got worse, and soon they discovered what he was actually doing was some mysterious form of cataloguing.

Their fat, aging, orange cat Mille sported a collar with the number 1227. The garage door opener became 1376. Charlie paid for meals with bills numbered 1456 and 1457.

It simply couldn't be stopped. When Charlie pulled the pen from Noah's hands he screamed and pounded his fists with such violence it was terrifying. Charlie no longer had the energy to care that his home was being defaced, no longer cared about the questions and stares of potential dinner guests.

The doctor always said it would pass, like all his other phases, and that he would move on, but on a Monday afternoon Charlie came home from the university to find that Noah had begun the elaborate task of putting everything in the house in chronological order.

Again Amanda was exhausted and apologetic, panting at the doorway with hair dishevelled, her eyeliner smeared onto her temple.

“I'm so sorry, Mr. Stern, I couldn't stop him. He just got so upset—”

“It's okay, Amanda. I know whatever it is it's not your fault.”

Sometimes it amazed Charlie that Amanda had not yet quit. He was constantly impressed with her resilience and tolerance, both of Noah and himself.

Charlie hung his coat on a hook in the hallway and braced himself for what he would see inside. Amanda readied herself for his reaction, placing her hand over her mouth as if to muffle a cry.

Sitting there, among spoons and empty plastic bottles, Tamara's suit jacket and the toaster oven, Noah looked up at Charlie and pointed to a small, clear space on the floor of the living room.

A space between the ficus plant, 868, and the vacuum, 870.

“Daddy. 869.”