She Poured Out Her Heart (43 page)

“Right now?” Jane nodded. “Bummer.” He stood and then pulled Jane to her feet. It felt effortless, as if he could just as easily send her flying over his head.

Jane drove him back to his apartment and, with some reluctance, returned his jacket. They kissed again. She was growing very accustomed to that part of things. “You could come up if you want to,” he said, his voice buzzing her ear, and Jane said no, she really had to leave. And she did, that was true enough, but what if she stayed? The idea horrified her. The idea fascinated her.

“You can call me,” Jane said, feeling more and more like a teenager in an old song on AM radio. What if he never called again? Decided she was too freakish and unappealing, too much trouble? She would just up and die. No she would not, she was at least old enough to know that.

“Of course I will.” He gave her nipple a quick, friendly tweak. “Drive safe, now.”

So he wasn't the most conversationally gifted or sensitive guy around. Did she even care?

Jane got herself home and picked up Grace from her friend's house and thanked the other mother for watching the girls, and said that next time Katie could come over to their place. The woman asked if Jane had gotten her shopping done and Jane had a moment of blankness before she remembered that this was the reason she'd given for the afternoon, shopping. “I mostly looked around,” Jane said, and for the briefest moment the other woman's expression showed a flicker of interest or disbelief or mockery, and it filled Jane with sober fear.

Jane drove Grace home and told her she could watch one video but first she had to bring her dirty clothes down to the basement. Then Robbie's school day was over and the whole house took on the particular quality of his energy.

Eric was home on time, or rather, on time for him, and the four of them ate the chili mac casserole with sufficient good cheer, and Jane thought how strange it was, landing back in the everyday, serving a meal, herding the children through their minimally required manners, and all the rest of it. This must be how it was for Eric, coming home after his time with Bonnie. Holding himself apart, watching himself as he eased back into the life of his house and became the ordinary, expected self who lived here. He saw Jane watching him. “What?” he asked.

“Nothing.” He wouldn't be able to tell if there was anything different about her. He didn't pay enough attention to know.

Once she lay down at the end of the day, her real first alone time, she tried to locate and hold steady any one idea or impulse, such as wanting
to have sex with Patrick. But then, she also did not want to. She wanted him to be a means to an end, an obliging body, but his inconvenient human personality kept intruding. Her motives were both straightforward and not so. She wanted to get even, take something from Bonnie as Bonnie had taken from her. As if you could think of people in terms of belonging and stealing. But you did. There was no use pretending you were any better than you were.

She hardly owed Eric fidelity, she had no reason to feel guilty. She felt guilty. “I am a mess,” she said aloud, though nobody outside the small room would have heard, and that seemed like the one true statement she could make.

Bonnie was better at this sort of thing. Bonnie and all her sexy drama. Well, maybe she could pretend to be Bonnie. Just this once, be the wild and crazy one who everybody wanted.

Then Patrick didn't call. And didn't call. If Jane had wanted to be crazy, here was her chance.

She worried and suffered, suffered and worried, imagining every bad and worse possibility. He was ill, injured, hospitalized, with a rotating troupe of Irish relatives camped out in the waiting room. Ha, no. He was with some other girl. He'd lost her phone number. It was no big deal to him. He didn't care.

Jane could have called him, she almost did, but every time she came close she sank into her familiar gloom and self-doubt. She was the least sexually interesting person on the planet, both in and of herself, and as a rapidly aging suburban mom. Why would Patrick or anyone else want to pursue her? She was romance-proof.

Finally, he called. “Hey, how you been? How's my beach buddy?”

“Your what?” Jane said, but he was already talking past her.

“Listen, sorry I've been out of touch, I had to fill in for somebody at work and it totally wiped me out.”

“Really.” She was not inclined to listen to any breezy excuse he tossed her way. Should she hang up? Say something spiteful? Not if she wanted
to see him again, which she did. It was one of those stupid dilemmas you thought you were done with once you got married.

“Yeah, it was killer.” He didn't bother sounding killed or even particularly weary. Presumably he had recovered. “What's new with you?”

“I can't think of anything.” Stay mad? Invent an interesting anecdote? She said, “I guess I've been busy too.”

“Yeah?”

“Mmn.”

“All right then! So, did you get your work done?”

“My what?”

“Your work that was keeping you busy.”

“No, I'm still in the middle of some things.” Big fat lie.

“Ah.”

Jane didn't offer anything more. It was going to be up to him. He said, “I've been thinking about you.”

“Have you.” He must have all kinds of practice at getting women mad at him, and then talking himself back into their good graces.

“Hold on a minute.” There was a sound of rustling, then unidentifiable small collisions, then liquid swallowings and smackings. “Sorry. Bit of a dry mouth this morning.”

“Why's that,” Jane asked, careful not to sound very interested.

“Debauchery,” he said, and Jane giggled in spite of herself. “You didn't think I had such a big vocabulary did you?”

“No, I figured that's a word you might know.”

“Oh, good one. I didn't know you had a mean side.”

“You haven't seen mean yet.”

And just that fast she was happy with him again, and carrying on like a rabbit in heat. Which was pretty much how she'd wanted to be, wasn't it? Except with a little more dignity. Farewell to dignity. “We should get together sometime,” Patrick said, and Jane's rabbit heart went thumpity thump, and an agreeable agitation, a kind of sexual washing machine, started up in her. Then the dread settled in.

“That would be tricky,” Jane said, thinking of Katie's mom, and how she could hardly call up and beg another favor, not after her lame shopping story. “I don't know.”

“If it's easier, I can come there.”

Instantly Jane envisioned every small or large disaster, beginning with the erotic unsuitability of a house decorated to withstand two young children, the ringing phone or doorbell that would require answering, the unexpected arrival home of her husband/children/neighbors who would be greeted by the sight of Jane entertaining Patrick in some naked fashion. Was she actually going to do such a thing? It was beginning to seem that she was. “It would be pretty hard without a car.”

“All right. I guess—”

“A weekend might work.” Eric could watch the kids. Evil alibis occurred to her. She would say she was going to a museum. The opera. “I mean, if you didn't have to work.”

“Ah, they owe me. Or they could do me a favor and fire me.”

“I need a couple of days to try and set things up.” She wished she didn't sound so cold-blooded and businesslike. Set things up, she sounded like she was in charge of a catered luncheon. A phrase came to her: my heart misgave me. What did that even mean, how could your heart give or misgive? But she knew what it felt like. “Look, I'm still not sure about this.”

“That's my job, isn't it. Convincing you.”

Eric was mildly surprised when she told him she had a chance to see an Edward Albee revival with an old friend from her blood-bank days. No one he knew. It did not occur to him to suspect her of anything transgressive because it did not occur to him that she might be capable of doing so. It was as if her entire life had been camouflage, and now she might rob banks or hijack planes. She might be a little late, she told Eric. He was not to worry.

Should she go shopping for a new outfit? She decided not to, out of a
combination of guilt and thrift, plus confusion as to what, exactly, she wanted to look like, suburban sex kitten or virgin sacrifice. In the end Jane settled for a plain white V-neck shirt, pencil skirt, and modest heels. Her black trench coat over that, both because of the blustery weather and to add, she hoped, a bit of rakish glamour.

There were also certain mortifying decisions regarding underwear.

They were supposed to meet at a bar in Patrick's neighborhood so that she could be plied with liquor, although this had not been stated outright. It was just after sunset when Jane arrived and circled the block looking for a place to park. Here was the intersection where she'd had her accident. (She was driving the Toyota again, now repaired. Eric had leased the extravagant BMW, which Jane thought was a billboard for a midlife tantrum, although she did not tell him this.) She found a space at the curb where it looked like she might not get towed, and was about to get out when she saw Patrick across the street.

He was walking with his phone to his ear, slowing to talk, now stopping entirely and tucking his chin, as if for privacy on the busy street. His forehead churned, listening. He was wearing his leather jacket, which Jane understood was an important garment, both utilitarian and a token of vanity. His hair was a darker, damp color and it still showed comb tracks. Jane watched him. Again an agitation filled her, both pleasant and not pleasant, and she gave herself over to it, letting herself imagine a first and a second and third thing, and then Patrick put the phone away and it came to her, in the way such certainties did, just who he had been talking to.

Jane waited for him to walk on. She got out of the car and followed him down to the end of the block and watched him open the glass door of the nice-looking bar he'd selected. She dawdled for as long as she could, then she too went inside.

Although she was only a couple of minutes behind him, already Patrick had a drink in front of him at one end of the bar and was chatting
with the barmaid, a tall girl with a brutal haircut dyed a shimmering orange. He turned to look at Jane as she approached and she saw from his gaze that at least she looked all right.

“Hey.” He stood and leaned in to put a hand on her shoulder. “Let's get a table. What do you want to drink, wine? White wine?” He picked up his glass. “Sheila, why don't you bring us some of that Pinot Grigio. How's that sound?”

Jane said that sounded fine, thanks. She let him fuss over her chair and with hanging up her coat. The barmaid arrived with Jane's glass of wine. The cropped orange hair elongated her neck and made her seem even taller, like a giraffe who'd learned to serve drinks. Patrick settled himself in the chair across from Jane and leaned over the table toward her. Jane said, “How's Bonnie?”

“What?”

“How is she?”

“I guess she's all right.”

“Weren't you talking to her? A little while ago?”

“What?” he said again, attempting puzzlement. “What, she said that?”

“I saw you on the phone and I guessed it was her.”

“Well that's, I don't know why you would think that.”

“Not that it's any of my business. Except actually it is. I don't need to get any more into the middle of things than I already am.”

“Honestly, I was talking to—”

Jane held up her hand. “Did she say anything about my husband? You can tell me that, at least.”

“No,” he said, defeated, drained of good cheer. “She called me, OK? I guess she's still mad at me about, you know, that money. Other stuff too.” He shrugged, picked up his drink, put it down again. Suspicious. “Were you listening to us? Did she call you too?”

“It was a guess. Or a feeling, call it. I get them sometimes.”

“You're into surveillance, aren't you? You have those eavesdropper
things. You do phone hacking stuff. A buddy of mine, that's what his ex did.”

“No, it's more like intuition. A really strong sense that I know something. I can't explain it.”

“You mean you have superpowers?”

“Yes.”

He stared at her. “Or, not super,” she qualified. “It's not like I can fly, or start fires with my mind or anything. I know, it's a little weird.” Jane waited to see how he'd react. She watched him visibly consider, trying out one idea, then another.

“That's real interesting,” he said finally. “In a disturbing kind of way. Can you read minds?”

She thought there were probably times she could read his. She shook her head.

“Good, because that'd make me nervous.”

“Ha ha.” They relaxed, they offered up small bits of conversation. Jane drank her wine and nudged herself back into carnal mode. Should it matter if Bonnie called him, for whatever reason? She didn't want to be thinking about Bonnie but it could hardly be helped, with all their crossing of paths and sharing of men. Fine, now forget about her. Jane let the wine slide through her. It left a trail of glowing heat. She smiled at Patrick. “Tell me more about your softball team.”

They ordered a second drink but Jane left most of hers behind. They strolled out onto the dark street, Patrick's arm draped around Jane's shoulders, and how ordinary and how amazing it was to be nothing more than a body, an amorous body yearning toward another body. For just this moment she had no history, no resentments, no agenda. She was only a normal woman looking forward to normal sex. All right, she wanted it to be a lot better than normal. Small geysers of sensation erupted within her. She and Patrick kept lurching and knocking against each other. He was so oversized, it was hard for her to get in sync with
him, and not for the first time Jane imagined herself flattened, crushed, obliterated beneath his weight, oh Lord yes.