More Stories from the Twilight Zone (19 page)

He always thought Claire was his soul mate. That's what he told her at their wedding seventeen years ago.

That Saturday night, he realized he was wrong.

“Are you okay?” Claire asked. “You look like you've seen a ghost.”

“Just a chill,” Paul lied.

“In this room?” Claire said. “It's overheated! I'm dying.”

“Maybe,” Paul said, “I'm coming down with something.”

 

On Monday morning, at work, Paul's father-in-law and boss, Ben Kipfer, stuck his head into Paul's office.

“If you're coming down with something,” Ben said, “take the day off.”

“I wish Claire wouldn't tattle to you,” Paul said.

“She said ever since Saturday night, you've been under the weather,” Ben said, studying Paul for signs of flu. “Said you woke up sweating last night. The sheets were soaked.”

“Ben,” Paul said, “you know how much I love and respect you. But what goes on in my bedroom, soaked sheets and all, is none of your business.”

That day, Paul had lunch with his best friend and coworker, Laurie Traynor, at a Japanese restaurant on Fifty-seventh Street.

“You do look a little pale around the gills,” Laurie said.

“Has Ben been spreading stories?” Paul said.

Laurie shrugged.

“No one wants to catch the flu,” Laurie said. “Not with the market the way it is.”

“What I tell you stays at this table?” Paul said.

“Have I ever betrayed a confidence?” Laurie asked. “Even something as innocuous as taking Viagra.”

“I just needed something to perk things up,” Paul said.

“There are lots of other guys who'd perk things up outside the marriage bed,” Laurie said. “Married as long as you've been, using Viagra is like renewing your vows.”

“Saturday night,” Paul said, “I met someone. Well, not exactly met her, but saw her.”

“What's her name?” Laurie asked.

“I don't know,” Paul said.

Laurie fiddled with her sake cup.

“What are you going to do about it?” she asked.

Surprised by the question, Paul said, “Nothing. I love Claire.”

“Your life is too good.” Laurie laughed. “You can't help flirting with disaster.”

 

That evening, at home, Paul was helping his thirteen-year-old son, Jason, with his math homework. His sixteen-year-old daughter, Kelly, left to go “study” with friends. Claire was pasting pictures from the family's last vacation into one of their many photo albums.

Paul couldn't stop thinking about Lily—although he didn't yet know her name. He didn't imagine her figure or her face, but the heat he felt when he saw her, a tingling that slithered up his spine like a snake.

 

The next afternoon, at his usual coffee shop, Paul sat at his usual stool at his usual spot at the counter. He ordered his usual lunch—a BLT, bacon extra crisp—when he glanced into the long narrow room and saw Lily, opening her mouth to eat a forkful of chicken salad.

Her mouth closed. She chewed and looked over her still-raised fork into Paul's eyes.

Paul felt the snake in his spine again.

Lily's tongue darted out and licked her lips. And she smiled. At Paul.

Paul smiled back. Folded his newspaper to the editorial page and had to read a paragraph in Gail Collins's op-ed piece three times before he realized he was too distracted to focus.

When Paul again glanced at Lily, the booth she'd occupied was empty.

She had left.

At work, for the rest of the afternoon, Paul was in a foul mood. He uncharacteristically snapped at his secretary when a sheet of paper she put on his desk sailed onto the floor.

At home, he was unusually silent.

He went into the bedroom early and was sitting on the bed, his laptop in front of him, when he overheard Jason ask Claire, “What up with Daddy?”

“Yeah,” Kelly said, “what's his damage?”

“Probably a bad day at work,” Claire said.

“Well,” Kelly said, “that's not my fault.”

When Claire came into the bedroom later and curled up in bed next to him, Paul stiffened and said, “Can't you see I'm trying to work?”

Claire studied Paul's face—she couldn't recall the last time he had spoken so coldly to her—and then slipped out of the bed and went into the living room to read.

 

Two days later, Paul spotted Lily's reflection in the window of a cigar store as he was going in to buy some Gloria Cubana Churchills. He whipped around, but was too late. She was gone.

The day after that, on the way to work, Paul saw her at the far end of his jammed subway car. By the time he had elbowed his way through the car, she again was gone.

Must have gotten off at the last stop,
Paul thought.

But had they stopped?

He had gotten on the subway at Eighty-sixth Street. They were just now pulling in to the Seventy-ninth Street station.

Had he somehow made a mistake and gotten on at Ninety-sixth Street? Then, she might have gotten off at Eighty-sixth Street.

His cobbler was on Ninety-fourth. But he couldn't remember dropping off shoes before heading to work.

Paul determined not to let Lily distract him anymore.

But at lunch, at the diner, she was in the same booth she had been in a few days earlier.

Paul slipped off his stool and walked over to her, offering his hand.

“Paul Keller,” he introduced himself. “I saw you at the party the other day.”

“And all over town,” Lily said, taking Paul's hand. “Lily Sass.”

Feeling her touch made Paul weak. Looking into her eyes made Paul dizzy.

“Can I buy you lunch?” Paul asked.

But he had already sunk into the booth across from her. He couldn't help it. He felt his legs were about to give out.

Her tongue darted out and licked a spot of coffee off her lips.

“I would like that,” Lily said. Fixing his eyes with hers, she said, “And after lunch, why don't we play hooky?”

 

They ended up in Lily's apartment—on Riverside Drive and West Eighty-eighth Street.

“I don't do this with just anybody,” Lily said.

“No, no,” Paul said, sitting beside her on the couch. “Of course not.”

They had been necking. No petting, just kissing. Something Paul hadn't done since college. No, Paul thought, not since high school. By college, the distinction between necking and petting—between petting and fucking, for that matter—had become quaint.

But every time Lily seemed to invite Paul to go further than just kissing, Paul thought of Claire, of Kelly, of Jason, and stopped himself.

“I'm not crazy,” Lily said. “You feel it, too.”

“Yes,” Paul said. “It's like I've found—”

“Yourself,” Lily finished for him.

“I was going to say that,” Paul said, shocked to realize that the connection he felt with Lily was real.

“Like you've found yourself,” Lily said. “At last.”

 

That night, Paul suggested he take Claire and the kids out to dinner.

“What's the occasion?” Claire asked.

“I just feel like doing something all together,” Paul said.

In the restaurant, Paul worked too hard to make conversation, asking Kelly and Jason the kinds of questions about school and their friends he rarely asked. Trying to get Claire into a discussion about a recent movie he'd read about in the
Times
, but in a stilted, cocktail-party chatter way. By the time the check came, all four of them had lapsed into silence.

“Well,” Claire said, standing, “that was fun . . .”

 

Over the next month and a half, Paul met and necked with Lily three more times. At their last meeting, Paul explained he had to cut it off.

“I don't know where I am anymore,” Paul said.

“You don't have to explain,” Lily said. “I figured it was too good to last.” She gave a rueful smile. “Timing is everything, huh?”

 

For a month, Paul buried himself in his work. But the more he tried to forget Lily, the more he thought of her.

On every street, he thought he glimpsed her. In movie theaters, he was sure she was sitting a few rows ahead of him. In restaurants, he heard her laugh.

“Who is she?” Claire asked one night.

Paul didn't answer. They were lying in bed, side by side, staring at the ceiling.

“Do you want to sleep with her?” Claire asked.

“I haven't,” Paul said.

“But do you want to?” Claire demanded.

Paul's silence was her answer.

“I could have handled anything,” Claire said. “If you lost your job. Cancer. But not this. I have no way to fight this.”

“I ended it,” Paul said. “Weeks ago.”

“Whoever she is,” Claire said, “you might as well go to her. You're
not here anymore.” Claire whipped back the sheets and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “This isn't any kind of life,” she said.

Shrugging on her bathrobe, she said, “Go to her, get her out of your system, and come back. Or, if she's what you want, I'll give you a divorce.”

 

2

 

“It's perfect,” Paul told Laurie, after his first month with Lily.

“Just like you imagined?” Laurie asked, not sure whether she was being sarcastic.

“What we're like together,” Paul said, “it's something I never could have imagined.”

Laurie wanted to believe a relationship could be that good, but experience told her Paul must be living in a hopeful fantasy.

“In the morning,” Paul said, “when I open my eyes, she's there, standing by the bed with my coffee. Yesterday, on the way to lunch, we saw someone so intent on his BlackBerry, he went around a revolving door twice before getting out of a building. We share—”

“The pleasure of seeing other people act foolishly?” Laurie said.

“—a sense of the absurd,” Paul said. “Laurie, you're too cynical.”

“How's the sex?” Laurie asked.

“Telepathic,” Paul said. “Otherworldly.”

Paul had moved into Lily's apartment. Intimate, cluttered, fragrant. Lily had collected artifacts from her travels around the world. A jade figurine Lily had found in China was worth, according to one of Paul's friends who came to dinner, at least $100,000.

Paul found everything about Lily intriguing, exciting, surprising, new. She was the woman who would—in Goethe's phrase—“kiss him and make him eternal.”

But every gift has its price. And every paradise has its serpent.

At work, the price was a “wonderful opportunity” offered by
Paul's father-in-law, Ben. The head of the firm's Hong Kong office was being rotated back to New York. Paul could move the family to Hong Kong, do his two years there, and come back to the home office a full partner.

In Ben's mind, this was a win-win. Either Paul took the gig and broke it off with Lily. Or he turned it down—leaving Ben no choice but to fire him.

Paul turned down the offer—and cleared out his desk.

He saw the kids every Tuesday and every other weekend.

Kelly was sarcastic to Lily.

Jason was silent, sitting on one of the beds in Lily's guest room, cross-legged, plugged into his iPod.

Meals were a strain. If Lily cooked, Jason picked at the food, and Kelly claimed it made her sick.

If they went out to eat, the kids could never agree on a restaurant.

“You're not being fair to Lily,” Paul told his kids one evening, sitting on the edge of Jason's bed.

Kelly lay on her bed, facing the wall. Jason sat next to Paul, cross-legged as usual, listening to his iPod.

Kelly sat up. Violently.

“I don't want you to
tell
me everything's going to be all right,” she said. “I want you to
make
everything all right.”

“Why can't you just come home?” Jason asked, still plugged into his iPod.

“They'll get used to me,” Lily told Paul later that night.

 

By the end of the second month together, Paul began to notice . . . odd responses to his questions about Lily's past. She wasn't evasive, but the answers didn't add up.

She grew up outside of Boston in Newton, she told Paul once. But another time, she mentioned how much she loved the St. Patrick's Day parades she used to go to in Savannah, Georgia.

When Paul asked her about the apparent contradiction, she waved it away with a not unreasonable explanation. Part of her childhood was spent in Newton, part in Savannah.

One time, she said her father was in the aerospace industry. Another time, she said he was in the military.

“He worked in aerospace
for
the military,” Lily reasonably explained.

But the after-the-fact explanations seemed improvised to Paul. When he tried to dig deeper, Lily would kiss him and distract him with sex.

“What do you think she's hiding?” Laurie asked.

“I don't know,” Paul said. “But I don't really know that much about her.”

“Except what she tells you,” Laurie said. “It sounds like you don't trust her.”

“I trust her,” Paul said. “Enough.”

But he began waking up in the middle of the night, panicking. Who was she? What did he really know about her? What if she were a crook—or a con artist?

“Why would you think that?” Laurie asked when Paul admitted his night fears.

“Everyone she knows in New York is a new friend,” Paul said. “She appeared in town just a few months before we met.”

“You love her?” Laurie asked.

“Of course,” Paul said.

“You're feeling guilty about leaving Claire and the kids,” Laurie said, “and projecting your guilt onto Lily.”

 

For another month, Paul tried to ignore his suspicions.

But by spring, he began contacting the high school Lily claimed to have attended, looking up her homes in old telephone directories, checking the businesses where she claimed her father had worked.