Love and Other Natural Disasters (32 page)

"Keep talking," I said.

"You're so tight on me. You're
so sexy. Eve, Eve, Eve, Eve, what a beautiful name, Eve..."

I couldn't stand it. I erupted. I
released guttural sounds I'd never heard myself make before as I shuddered and
collapsed on top of him. I was nearly hyperventilating.

He stroked my hair.
"Eve," he whispered in my ear. "Sweet Eve."

I couldn't move or speak. He was
running his hands lightly along the sides of my body, and I shivered against
him.

After a few minutes, I realized he
was still hard inside me. "You didn't come," I said. The truth was, I
didn't want to do anything about that. I was spent.

"This was your night. And
trust me, I had a time of it."

I slipped away from him, and
laughed. "My legs have gone numb."

"You were up there
awhile." He grinned at me.

"That was crazy. Just"—I
fumbled for a word, then finished—"crazy. I don't know what else to
say."

"I saw you. You don't need to
say anything."

I felt shy, realizing he'd watched
me. Then I said, "How'd I look?"

"Spectacular. You should do
that more often."

"Thank you. For
everything."

"My absolute pleasure."

Not sure about the protocol, I
asked, "Do you want
me
to go home?"

"No. Why would I want
that?"

"We said no pressure."

"Look, no pressure doesn't
mean no feelings. I think you're a terrific woman. In love with your husband,
but that's a story for another time." He touched my face. "Don't look
so stricken. Did you think I was somehow missing that fact?"

I'd just had the most intense
orgasm of my life with a man who not only didn't love me, but seemed fine with
the fact that I loved Jon. And he was right, it was a fact.

"Can I give you a piece of
advice?" he said.

"Sure," I managed.

"Figure out why you're so mad
at Jon. It's not just because of this other woman. You've been pissed at him a
long time."

"This is the weirdest
conversation I've ever had."

"You don't get out enough."

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

So I had the most amazing,
earth-shattering sex of my life," I announced. "And I want Jon
back."

Tamara burst out of the dressing
room, looking like a half-plucked peacock: one arm in, the other arm out of, an
entirely too lacy wedding dress.

"That's not the one," I
told her.

"You had sex with Jon!"
she squealed.

"No, I had sex with Ray."

"You had amazing sex with Ray,
and realized you want Jon back?" she asked incredulously.

"Yes."

"How does that happen?"

"I haven't a clue."

"So you're not going to have
sex with Ray anymore?"

"My body really wants to, but
no. I love Jon, and I want to try to trust him again."

Tamara plopped down on the raised
platform, facing away from the three strategically placed mirrors. She worked
her free arm into the dress as she considered her next statement.

"You don't have to be
diplomatic. You can be excited. I know this is what you've been wanting," I
said.

She cocked her head. "I don't
know."

"What do you mean, you don't
know? You were against me dating Ray from the start."

"Well, Clayton's always been
so sold on you getting back with Jon that I guess I just went along. Not
consciously," she added quickly. "You know how it's so easy to get
sucked into thinking the same way when you're in a couple?" I nodded and
waited for her to continue. "The thing is—and don't take this the wrong
way—maybe you and Jon aren't the best match."

One of the few touchstones of my
life throughout the past months had been Tamara's certainty about my marriage
and her unshakable faith in Jon. It had alienated us, no doubt, but it was an
underlying constant. With it suddenly pulled away, I felt like a house losing
one of its support beams.

"Say something," Tamara
said nervously, plucking at the lace inlay on the satin skirt of her gown.

"I'm just surprised."

"It's like, I'd finally
decided to support you in moving on, and now you want Jon back. I feel like I'm
always doing the wrong thing by you. And we just get further and further
apart..." She looked away, trying not to cry.

I sat down on the dais next to her.
"I'm glad I'm here today. I wasn't sure you'd still want me to do this
with you."

"I'm glad you're here,
too." She looked down at herself. "I hate these dresses."

"That's a bad one."

"I hate them all. They're not
me."

"No wedding dress is you until
you put it on and suddenly see yourself there." I flashed back to my own B
moment of recognition: that's the woman who's marrying Jon. God, I was
thrilled.

"I'm thirty-two years old. I
don't want to waste a year planning some wedding that's going to spend our down
payment on a house."

"I thought your parents were
paying for it."

"They're fighting about it. My
mom thinks my dad should pay more than half, since he's got so much more money,
but, of course, Trudy is fighting tooth and nail against it." Trudy was
her stepmother. "Clayton sees how much I hate the fighting, plus he's got
his pride about having them pay for the whole wedding, so we decided to foot
most of the bill. But really, my mother's the one who wants it to be some
extravaganza to make all her friends jealous." She gestured to her dress.
"I mean, this isn't me."

I felt sad that this was the first
I was hearing about something she had probably been struggling with for a
while. "Does Clayton want a big wedding?"

"Not particularly."

"So don't do it. Have what you
want. What do you want? Come on, just say the first thing that comes to your
mind, like free association."

"It's easier to say what I
don't want. I don't want something formal. I don't want a veil. I want to walk
down to Clayton with him looking into my face the whole way."

"That's the advantage of being
thirty-two. You know who you are. Do whatever you want; don't do anything you
don't." I put my arm through the crook of her elbow and smiled at her.

She smiled back. "I don't want
a head table."

"Amen!"

Laughing, she said, "And I'm
not going to have place cards. People can sit wherever the hell they
want."

"Hallelujah!"

"Only the people who really
love us can come. No friends of my mother's that I haven't seen since I was
twelve. And I want to wear one of those slip dresses, something simple and
silky, and flowers in my hair," she said, warming to the fantasy.

"That sounds beautiful,
Tarn."

"Now, you just have to help me
tell my mother."

I laughed. "Oh, I can do it.
I've been standing up to Sylvia—sort of—for years." As I spoke her name,
inspiration struck. "What about Sylvia's house? Say, her backyard. Then
you wouldn't have to reserve a place way in advance and you could have the
wedding sooner, if you wanted."

Tamara's eyes lit up. "Like
this summer!"

"Over in Berkeley, it's
beautiful in, say, August. Even early September. No fog."

"That yard was gorgeous!"

"There's a clearing between
some trees, where you could have the ceremony, with a view over the bay."

"It would be perfect."
She looked at me urgently. "Do you really think she'd loan us her
house?"

For all Sylvia's faults, I knew she
would, and that made me feel a rush of affection for the old broad. It was a
good time to have one, since I might stay her daughter-in-law after all.

Not shopping for a wedding dress
with Tamara turned out to be the best day we'd spent together in months. We
left the store and went out for a three-cocktail lunch. Mostly, we were talking
and laughing, but halfway into her third vodka tonic, Tamara told me why she'd
been thinking maybe Jon and I weren't made for each other after all.

She recalled times she'd seen me be
short with Jon, or blame him for things, and times when he and I disagreed and
I just ran him over. Sometimes, she said, I didn't seem to have perspective
where Jon was concerned. If something was frustrating me, it was Jon's fault.

I asked why she'd never said
anything when Jon and I were together, and she answered that he just seemed to
take it in stride. If it doesn't bother him, she figured, why should it bother
her? Who was she to criticize someone else's relationship? Besides, a lot of
the time, Jon and I looked great together. We had history and in-jokes. A lot
of the time, she said, Jon and I were what she and Clayton wanted to be.

Once, she'd gotten a taste of my
full-scale anger toward Jon. He was late from work and he hadn't called. Tamara
and I were supposed to go out somewhere, and Jacob had been acting up all
afternoon, and I was maybe five months pregnant and not feeling good. She said
Jon apologized right away, but I said, "Get in here," and indicated
that he should follow me to the bedroom. From the living room, Tamara could
hear me shouting. She couldn't hear Jon much at all. Then I came down the hall,
my face tight, and said, "Come on, let's go."

Was that the night, I wondered,
when Jon e-mailed Laney about how I'd acted? Or maybe he'd felt low and called
her. Remembering the way I talked to Jon that day—and how I'd thought nothing
of it at the time, how I'd felt justified, even—I saw that I had opened the
door for Laney myself. I hadn't invited her in; no, Jon had done that. But he
hadn't acted entirely alone. In a strange way, it was good to think that there
was a reason for Laney. If I wasn't blameless, then there were things I could
do better next time, if Jon and I had a next time.

When I got home, Charlie was
talking a mile a minute about his future. Normally, I would have been overjoyed
to hear him even say the word, but not that day. He was talking about maybe
getting his own apartment, whether I'd be willing to pay him whatever the day
care places charged, and what rents were like in that area. I asked him if he
really wanted to live in the suburbs, and he hemmed and hawed and played coy,
but it was clear he was just wanting to live near Lil. His fantasy was getting
a short-term lease, with the idea that Lil would ask him to move in with her
after a few months. He'd never lived with a woman before, but this could be
something great. He said it twice: this could be something great. I bit my
tongue, went into my room, and called Lil.

She answered her cell phone on the
fourth ring, slightly out of breath. "Oh, hey, Eve," she said.

"Lil, you need to do something
about my brother."

"What's with the stage
whisper?"

"He's in the other room and I
don't want him to hear what I'm about to tell you."

She sighed, and I had a feeling she
already knew. "Okay, tell me."

"It's gone on too long. He's
talking about getting his own apartment out here. This is the first time he's
talked about living anywhere other than where we grew up. This is big. He's
talking about his future." I found myself about to cry.
"His
future.
He never talks about that. And he thinks his future is with you.
You have to tell him that it isn't."

After a pause, Lil said, "I
wish it was. It's not easy finding someone as good as Charlie. Just genuinely
good. I've never, ever believed anyone before when he said he'd do anything for
me."

"Charlie said that?"

"Yes." Lil's breath was
ragged. "But I can't put my energy into something that's going to end
someday. I can just see it. We don't have enough in common, it'll take years
for him to get his shit together, and let's face it, he's got years to burn
that I don't."

I'd never heard Lil admit before
that aging mattered. "So you need to end it now."

"I know. I don't want
to."

"Lil, please. You need to.
He's my brother."

Her voice was sadly determined.
"I will. I'll do it tonight, so be ready. He might need you."

Charlie didn't come home that
night. I waited up, and finally called Lil on her cell phone at midnight. She
said flatly, "I did it, he left around ten. I don't want to talk about
it." I asked if she was okay, and she said in that same tone that she was.
There seemed to be nothing left to say, so I hung up and worried.

He showed up the next morning at
six-thirty. He looked like hell, smelled like booze, and he, too, didn't want
to talk about it. "I'm going to sleep now," he said.

"If you're not coming home,
you need to call me. I was worried all night."

"I thought you'd figure I
stayed at Lil's." He looked me full in the face. "She already told
you."