Also, this: he didn’t look at her the same way. He didn’t look at her much at all.
Maybe this was temporary. It was a time of adjustment, necessarily difficult. They were bound to lose themselves a little. Maybe they’d have a good night, with a friend, and be grown-ups together—though of all people, she thought, it was a shame they had to be grown-ups with Dilrod.
He showed up at eight, an hour late, smelling of vodka and cigarettes, hugging them both a little too hard. His name wasn’t actually Dilrod, it was Alan Dilworth; but in high school Dilrod sounded funnier. While she reheated the pad thai in the microwave Stefan made drinks, asking all about the new woman, where they’d met, who she was.
“She’s awesome,” Dilrod said. “She drove me to the airport so that I wouldn’t have to pay for long-term parking. Finally I’ve met somebody who anticipates my needs instead of putting herself first.”
Jill held back a snort. To say this was the source of Dilrod’s relationship problems was so off-base as to belong in a different country from the base, a different solar system. What killed her about Dilrod’s women was that they were invariably intelligent, attractive, and reasonably successful; they were independent filmmakers, schoolteachers, dental hygienists. She always thought they could do better than Dilrod, but apparently they couldn’t.
Though he wasn’t, she had to admit, bad-looking. His vibe was teenage prepster gone to seed: chest muscled but stomach slightly paunched, his wispy blond hair like dandelion weed around his head, his eyes a little bloodshot but still a piercing blue. He wore
striped collared shirts and frayed khakis. He was in sales for some computer company and had managed to hold on to his position despite the tumult of the past ten years, so he must have been good at it, or at least had a knack for survival. He stood in the kitchen with a drink in his hand, gesturing, his mouth open, so obviously happy to see Stefan that you had to like him for it. He’d added two days on to his business trip just to see them.
“So, dude,” he was saying, “you’ve got to come out and meet her. Come next month, for my birthday. Take some time off work.”
“Things are crazy right now.”
“You always say that, dude.”
“It’s always true.”
Stefan was happy too, laughing and shaking his head at everything Dilrod was saying. They would never hug each other, these two, nor write or call during the intervals when they were apart; but stick them in a room together and they almost swooned with affection.
She put the food out, and they ate. Phoebe’d been so fussy that Jill had curtailed her diet drastically, restricting all but the blandest foods, and now the shrimp exploded on her tongue. Would all experiences be as dramatic as this when she experienced them again, this time as a mother—spicy food, alcohol, sex? She was still waiting for that last one, waiting for both of them to feel something other than exhausted. Dilrod was telling a long story about his ex-wife and her frightening Croatian mother. Stefan was laughing, harder than seemed warranted. Jill sat back and let her attention wander. Being a mother was all about attention, every moment on a hair trigger, alert for the baby’s cry. But right now Phoebe was asleep, thank God, and she’d let herself drink half a glass of wine and her mind go pleasantly blank. She felt her muscles,
her body, the container of her physical self, as if for the first time in years.
“Sweetest,” Stefan said, smiling, “I think you’re falling asleep.”
For an hour or so she nodded off with the baby, and when she came back they were arguing. From the other room it had sounded serious, but it turned out to be about movies. In particular, a director whose films Stefan loved and Dilrod thought was ridiculous.
“Any time there’s a mansion in a movie,” Dilrod was saying, “and in that mansion there’s a tent, and inside that tent there’s a person listening to Nick Drake—I hate that person and I hate that movie.”
“I love Nick Drake,” Stefan said, slurring a little. During the time she’d been gone, they’d finished off the vodka.
“You know who I’m into lately?” Dilrod said, shifting in his seat. “Billy Joel. Valerie and I saw him in concert last summer and I have to say he totally rocked.”
“You can’t sit there telling me that you hate Nick Drake and Billy Joel totally rocked. This is an impossible statement.”
“ ‘This is an impossible statement,’ ” Dilrod mimicked, in a high, girlish voice.
Stefan’s red face deepened to beet. Jill stared at Dilrod. She’d forgotten what a dick he was. She could see what he obviously couldn’t—how his scorn still lashed at Stefan. When the two of them were together, Stefan returned to his former self, the awkward son of German immigrants who was desperate to fit in. She’d been to Stefan’s hometown in Illinois, where he’d slammed beer from funnels and joked with football players and talked about girls in God only knew what way. All those guys were sales executives
and lawyers now; Stefan was the outlier. He was a social worker married to a freelance book designer, and his parents smiled stiffly while others in the neighborhood bragged about how well their kids were doing.
College had set him free. That was where he learned—just as she had, around the time they met in a philosophy class—that there were legions of them, the misfit kids from all over the country, the readers, the too-smart and the uncool, the secret music fetishists and film trivia mavens, and that they could get together and form their own army, their own band. Weirdness was their passport to citizenship in this new country, and taste was the stamp on it. Liking Nick Drake—well, that was practically a law.
Nowadays they’d grown so used to living in this country that they forgot, a lot of the time, that not everybody did. They did see, of course, everything that lay outside it; they read the newspaper; their alienation took fervent, political form. But it was also rigid, calcified, taken for granted.
Which is to say that they no longer knew people who thought differently from themselves.
Except Dilrod, who was now ranting, spittle at the edges of his mouth. “And there’s some fucking guy in Japan who’s in love with a girl and all they do is sing karaoke? I don’t buy one word of that. I believe in Superman. I believe in Batman.”
“Those movies are so generic,” Stefan protested. “Empty formulas.”
“Yeah, but they’re
good
formulas. Formulas of intense, exciting shit. Formulas that say I don’t have to watch some depressed chick sit around a hotel room all day long in her panties. No offense, Jill.”
He expected her to say, “None taken,” or to get mad. Not wanting to give him the satisfaction, she shrugged. Stefan burst out
laughing. This was how he handled it, the gap between himself and where he came from: by treating it as a joke. And maybe it was. He was always delighted when Dilrod showed up. Back in tenth grade, it was Dilrod who’d befriended him, taught him what to wear and what to say to girls. No matter that in college he’d changed his clothes, his politics, his entire direction in life; some part of him would always be grateful. When she went to bed, they were still arguing, and she fell asleep long before Dilrod took a cab back to the hotel.
The next day, Stefan told her that he and Dilrod were going out that night. Well, he asked her, but so politely and submissively that only a shrewish wife could say no. She wouldn’t have done that anyway, and resented the expectation that she might.
“You don’t have to ask my permission,” she said. “It’s fine.”
“My girls will be okay?”
His saying
my girls
had always annoyed her—like they were his backup singers, or secretaries—but she let it pass. “We’ll be great,” she said. “So what’ll you guys do—go see Billy Joel?”
Instead of laughing, Stefan frowned, defensive. “Don’t be a snob,” he said.
“Oh, come on. How is that snobby?”
“It sounds classist.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Dilrod has more money than either of us. His dad went to Yale. It’s not about class.”
She didn’t know how to put it, exactly.
It makes him a stranger to us,
she wanted to say.
You are what you like, and he doesn’t get what we like.
But she sensed that no matter how she phrased it, she’d still look bad.
“What’s it about, then?” he asked, pressing her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Something else.”
She was nursing the baby when Stefan left, without saying where they were going. Phoebe wasn’t fussing and it was, in fact, nice, sometimes, to have her to herself. To be quiet in a pink room with the baby at her chest. To sing a lullaby. It was like a dream of what she thought parenthood could be. Weirdly enough this fantasy only seemed true when the two of them were alone. When Stefan was around she was always worried, wondering if they were happy, if he was happy, if the baby was happy. When it was just her and Phoebe she experienced an animal certainty about life: it was her job to feed this little body, to soothe and shepherd and put her to sleep. It was the biggest responsibility she had ever had; it was enormous, towering; it wiped her out. But it was not, somehow, all that complicated.
It was past three when Stefan came home. She’d just fed Phoebe and was still awake, if a little dazed, when he crawled in beside her. He smelled like alcohol and smoke, and her stomach turned over. She’d gotten ultrasensitive to smells while she was pregnant, and it hadn’t gone away.
“Have fun?” she said.
He propped himself up on one elbow and didn’t answer, so she turned to him, opening her eyes in the dark. Before her vision could adjust he kissed her. She was shocked by the heat of his mouth, the lust in it. She kissed him back, her tongue on his, and the feeling was like coming home to a place she’d abandoned and missed terribly, though she had forgotten it.
Then, as if satisfied, he leaned his head back against the pillow and fell asleep, snoring.
In the morning, Stefan’s hangover looked to be killing him. She could only laugh, but it annoyed her when he just sat there when Phoebe’s diaper needed changing. Then again, she reminded herself, there were plenty of times when she was sick, or tired, and he did help. She brought him some ginger ale and Advil and patted him on the shoulder. As the day wore on, he didn’t seem to feel any better. He didn’t eat anything and sat in front of the television, groaning every once in a while.
“Dilrod really did a number on you, didn’t he? What did you guys get up to, anyway?”
“I’m nauseous with remorse,” Stefan said.
“Was it rum?” she said. Ever since college rum had made him sick. She’d seen him throw up after a single daiquiri. But he was drawn, sometimes, to the challenge of it.
“I have to tell you something,” he said, his tone shifting. She stood in front of him, bouncing up and down with her knees bent. It looked idiotic but kept Phoebe calm.
“We went to a strip club,” Stefan said.
“You’re kidding. Really? Why?” It didn’t occur to her to get mad—it just seemed inexplicable. Men of their acquaintance, hers and Stefan’s, didn’t do that kind of thing. It was an activity to roll your eyes at.
“It was Dil’s idea. You know, to celebrate getting married again. He’s not having a real bachelor party this time.”
“I didn’t realize they were getting married.”
“He proposed to her yesterday. On the phone.”
Jill laughed, but her husband’s expression cut it short. “How do you not think that’s funny?”
“So we went to this club,” he went on, as if he hadn’t heard her or didn’t care what she said. “We drank a lot. And we got, uh, lap dances.”
She looked at him. In the “uh,” that ungainly hesitation, were layers of omission and ghosts of scenes she didn’t want to envision, her husband watching, aroused … In her surprise she stopped bouncing, and Phoebe fussed so she had to start again. Her knees hurt. What she thought about wasn’t some woman contorting herself over her husband, though that was gross enough; what she thought about was their kiss in the night, the heat of his tongue, all that intensity she’d thought was returning for her, to her. She was suddenly so tired that tears rolled fatly down her cheeks before she even knew she was upset.
“Please,” Stefan begged her. “It was nothing. I missed you both so much, my girls, I’m sorry.”
He pulled her down on the couch and held both of them, and his voice sounded panicked, ashamed, like any old husband who knew he’d done wrong.
When Dilrod came over to say good-bye, he could tell something was up. Jill’s eyes were red, and Stefan was visibly stricken by rum and shame. Jill left the room, but could still hear them.
“Oh, tell me you didn’t, you pussy.”
“I had to tell her,” Stefan said feebly. “She’s my wife. I couldn’t live with it.”
“Live with what, you asshole?”
“It was bad enough to have done it. I couldn’t keep it secret. I felt disgusted.”
“You
should
be disgusted,” Dilrod told him. “You’re such a fucking fake. Acting so fucking sanctimonious. So
progressive.
You were loving it last night. You were eating that shit up. Now you have to pretend like you’re ashamed. You’re not. You just want your wife to believe you are.”
She couldn’t hear Stefan’s response, though from his murmured tone she knew he was denying it. But here was the thing: she thought Dilrod was right. In Stefan’s jokes about rug rats and the old lady, there was a grain of truth. And in the disdain he claimed to feel for the strip club, there was a grain of longing. Of desire.
“A fucking fake,” Dilrod said again, loudly, and the door slammed shut.
Stefan came stomping upstairs, angry. He stopped at the door of the nursery, where she sat in the glider with Phoebe. He looked defenseless, miserable. She wanted to comfort him, but what could she say? He was a fake and she knew it; to deny it was ridiculous; his fakeness was part of him, as much as his dark brown hair and the odd bump on his shoulder he’d had since he was twenty-five. He’d been a football jock, a college philosopher, briefly an aspiring writer, now a professional and a parent. Each of these versions of himself was fragile, dented with the effort required to build it.
“I love you,” she said, and he smiled.