The Stuff That Never Happened (30 page)

He kept looking at me, working his mouth around and around. It was in that silence that I knew I had him. A wide spaciousness opened up in me. I went across the room and took his hand, and he was helpless. He didn’t even try to move away.

“And,” I said, holding on to his hand and talking too fast, “you know you still love me, too. You’re like one of those swans that mates for life. And I’m your mate. Face it.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I really, really can’t let you do this to me again.”

I was so close to him that I could see myself in his eyes. He had a slight twitch in his lower lid. I whispered, “I will never hurt you again. I will never, ever hurt you again,” and brought my arms up to circle his neck.

“No,” he said. “No. Annabelle,
no
.” He kept shaking his head, and then he walked to the front door and let himself out without another word. I was stunned. I stood there for a little while, wanting to cry and not being able to find any tears to cry with. And then I cleared the table and washed the dishes and put them away. My mouth was dry and my head was stuffy from the wine. I was drained and exhausted. I put on my nightgown and went and got in bed, turned on
The Tonight Show
for a while. Then I couldn’t sleep, so I sat at my desk and started drawing.

At two o’clock, the door buzzed. Without even thinking, I leaned over and pushed the button, knowing already it was Grant. I met him at the door, pulling my wrap around me. And sure enough, he came charging into the apartment, his hair flying everywhere. He looked drunk. He pushed me up against the wall, and when he kissed me, his mouth was so hard against mine that I could feel his teeth. When we pulled apart his eyes were tightly shut, and he was grimacing as if he was in the very worst pain.

“God damn it, Annabelle, I can’t let you do this to me again.”

“I won’t,” I said. “I won’t. I swear I won’t. This time it will be different. You’ll see.”

He gripped my shoulders. “All right,” he said. His voice was different from anything I’d ever heard out of him. “I’ve been walking ever since I left here. And I’ve been thinking about whether people can love each other even in the face of … of mistrust. And here’s what I figured out. If I take you back, here’s the deal. This is the only way I can accept it. I know something about obsession, and I know you’ll never really get over … 
him
. So—”

“No, I
am
over him—”

“This isn’t really negotiable, Annabelle. I know you’re always going to love him. But the deal has to be that you agree not to see him again or talk to him—”

“I haven’t!”

“You can’t tell me later that you’ve decided you’re going to be friends with him. I can’t be friends with that bastard.”

“No. Not friends.”

He gave me a level look, pushed me harder against the wall. “And we have to leave New York and get a fresh start.”

“Back to California?” This was a surprise.

“That, or we can go to New Hampshire and live in the house I grew up in. My parents are talking about retiring and going to Florida, and it’ll be our house. They’re leaving it to me. And I-I’ll get a job teaching in the community college. We can raise a family there.”

“Community college? But you don’t really want to leave Columbia—”

He put his finger up to my lips. “Sssh. I do want that. It’s the thing I have to do to save this marriage. It’s just the way things have to be. It’s important enough to me to do this. But, if I leave all this, you have to do your part.”

I nodded. “I will.”

“No. Don’t say that until you hear all the terms.” He was speaking in a low, dramatic voice I’d never heard from him. “There’s one more thing that is the most important thing to me. We have to make a pact to be completely and utterly faithful to each other. I’m not going to discuss it to death. And I’m not going to worry about whether I trust you anymore or not. I can’t live that way, suspicious and thinking that the next guy you meet is the one you decide to run away with. I can’t live that way, and I
won’t.”

I shook my head. “No one should have to.”

“I will be completely true to you, Annabelle. And you will be true to me. As simple as that. It’s a fresh start. The beginning of our real marriage.”

I nodded.

“It’s our pact. A sacred pact. All that stuff from before never happened. Can you do that?”

“Never—?”

“A new marriage. I just want us to put the past behind us and get the hell out of the city and go and start our real life. Can you do that?”

“Yes.” I lifted my chin.

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“And we won’t talk about it.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

He searched my face. “I mean it. I’m not going to mistrust you. I’m not going to look for evidence and read your mail and always think the worst, because I’m taking you at your word, Annabelle. This means everything. I won’t have my heart broken again.”

“No, no,” I said. “Stop looking at me like that. I’m not going to break your heart again. This is what I want.”

“Okay,” he said. He didn’t smile. “So. No cheating. No talking about
past
cheating. And we quit our jobs and move to New Hampshire.”

“New Hampshire,” I said.

“Yes. It’s beautiful there. And we’ll go skiing in the winter, and ice-skating on the pond, and in the fall we’ll pick apples and in the summer we’ll swim and have barbecues and our kids will grow up knowing how to fish and play baseball, and they’ll be on teams, and maybe I’ll be the basketball coach, and you’ll paint and make our house look beautiful, and you’ll make friends, and the house will be filled up with everything that’s good—”

“Wait. There’s something I want, too,” I said. “If we’re making a pact.”

“Okay, what?” He tried to make his face neutral, but I could see there was still some fear in it.

“A baby,” I said. “I want us to have a baby soon. There’s no better fresh start than that.”

He kissed me gloriously and truly and with emotion. It was the happiest I’d seen him. “Okay! Okay, yes, we’ll have a baby soon. To seal the deal.”

It was three thirty in the morning by then, and we went to bed and made love until the sun came up, when we got up and took a walk out on the streets, curled into each other. The diner opened at six and we ate doughnuts and drank coffee that was as strong and bitter as mud, and we talked to the cops and construction guys who were there getting breakfast, and I was the luckiest woman in New York.

Magda was right: I’d had my scandal, my freedom, plenty of blue eye shadow, and the chance to learn to carry seven plates at once. I’d had apartments and temp jobs, and now I’d met a woman who wanted me to draw pictures for children’s books. Not only that, I had my marriage back and my husband trusted me again—and although I loved this crazy city dearly, I knew I was getting out of it in the nick of time and heading to the life I was meant for.

Our journey to New Hampshire, this time with a U-Haul filled with the detritus of our separate lives—two couches, two toasters, two television sets—was a very different sort of trip. We held hands in the cab and listened to cassette tapes instead of the radio.

And we didn’t look back.

[seventeen]

2005

G
rant and Nicky arrive for spring break, and Sophie and I make room for them. I clean the place in anticipation of their arrival, put away all our cosmetics and hair appliances, and lay in plenty of food; and then they come stamping in with their boots and their huge jackets and their smells and their loud-voiced complications, and the place suddenly feels unprepared. She and I just have to slide over, content ourselves with the little bits of oxygen they leave us to breathe.

They are having a fight, for one thing—or what passes for one in Grant’s world, which is little more than a tight-lipped silence on his part while Nicky rails against him, trying to make Grant concede a point. It’s the problem of whether Nicky should be allowed to take a semester off, or whether that will mean the end of his ambition and his college career and lead him down the path toward ruination and disgrace. Apparently this discussion has been going on throughout their drive down, and from what I can tell, it doesn’t seem to be moving beyond the same loop of exasperation. Every time I glance over at Sophie, she gives me a mock-panicky look, like Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
, which makes me laugh.

Grant has that firm set to his jaw that I remember from our fights, the way he has of clenching his mouth closed while some little spasm in his jaw lets you know just how furious he is. When he comes in and kisses me, he whispers, “I may have to take that boy out and lose him in the subway.”

“Don’t you dare,” I say. “He’s my sweet patootie.”

“Yeah, you say that now. No nineteen-year-old boy is a sweet patootie after you’ve been in a car with him for six hours straight. Trust me on this.”

Nicky has a stubbly beard now and he looks both wilder and more muscular than when I saw him last, which was really only weeks ago, at Christmas break. Still, peeking out from that masculine puffery, he has that same little-boy way of ducking his head and grinning shyly. He’s also in constant motion, pantomiming a boxing match, suddenly leaping in midair on the quest to touch a light fixture, or collapsing to the ground and doing a few push-ups. This makes Sophie nearly crazy.

“Can you
stop
moving for one instant?” she cries out. “You’re making me so nervous I’m going to give birth right this second. And it is not going to be pretty!”

“Cool,” says Nicky, now running in place. “I think the sooner you pop out that kid, the better you’re going to feel.”

“Not if the placenta comes first,” she says. “Just in case you didn’t know, I have to have
surgery
to have this baby. There’ll be no
popping
it out.”

He stares at her, and then I see him getting interested. He walks carefully over to the bed and leans down. “Wow, look at that thing. It’s big. Can I touch it? Does it move? I mean, I know it moves. But can you make it move for me?”

“It’s not an
it
, it’s a
she
. And, yeah, she moves when she wants to. Here, touch right here. Feel that? I think that’s the knee. She has very bony knees.”

He reaches a tentative hand over to her abdomen.

“Press hard,” she tells him. “She’s deep down in there, you know. She doesn’t just hang out on top all the time.” I can see how pleased she is at his interest. “Here. Feel that? Ooh, she just kicked. Did you feel it?”

He sits back on his heels and looks at her with shining eyes. “That is so bizarre,” he says. “Is it the weirdest feeling ever, having somebody kicking you from the inside? Wow. Like, she
lives
there. She thinks you’re her whole house!”

“I
know,”
says Sophie. “Believe me, she thinks she owns the place.”

Grant, standing over by the door with his arms folded, looks at me and smiles. I know what he’s thinking—he’s remembering the time when I was pregnant with Sophie and lying against the couch cushions with a plate propped on my belly while I ate a sandwich and read a book, and Sophie suddenly gave a huge kick and the plate went spinning across the glass coffee table, landing so hard it cracked it. After that, he had called her Killer, and after she was born, I said he had to stop with the mean nickname. Of course, he couldn’t; eventually I had had to fine him a dollar every time he referred to her that way.

Then—is he remembering this, too?—years later, when we were watching her streak victoriously down the field, kicking a soccer ball toward a goal while both her own teammates and the members of the opposing team stood stunned and immobile in her wake, he had leaned over and whispered to me, “My God, she honed that kick in the womb. She really is Killer.”

We smile at each other now. He mouths the word “Killer,” and I laugh. It’s a nice moment. We’re all together in this tiny apartment, and none of us is fighting. Nicky, in fact, has stretched out on the bed next to Sophie and he’s taken over the television remote while keeping one hand resting respectfully on Sophie’s abdomen, which he’s calling “Beanie’s house.” He clicks over to a Nickelodeon special, something they both remember from childhood, and for a brief minute, they are laughing together. Grant and I step over the duffel bags and the jackets and hats and boots and paraphernalia, and go to the living room/kitchen-on-one-wall area, where he pours us glasses of wine and talks to me while I make pizza for dinner.

THEY STAY for five days, and really we do just fine, the four of us. Okay, we do pretty well. It’s a little bit like old times, the good and the bad all mixed up together. We sit up in Sophie’s bed with her and play Scrabble and Monopoly and scooch in all together and watch movies at night. I cook all their old favorites, even in this one-horse kitchen: pot roast and lasagna and an apple crumb pie. We make picnics and eat in the bed with a tablecloth flung over the bedspread.

Bad things: Nicky gets restless and we send him out on errands and to explore the city, and he stays gone too long and doesn’t answer his cell phone. We’re up half the night worrying about him before he returns, and then Grant says this is exactly why he has to go back to college next semester, so we can be sure where he is.

There’s another bad moment one afternoon when Sophie talks to Whit on the phone, and she’s obviously getting emotional and trying not to cry, and Grant gets so exasperated listening to her side of the conversation that he has to leave the room.

Good things: Grant, always a sucker for pregnant women, takes care of Sophie, bringing her whatever little thing she wants, and some things she didn’t even know that she wanted, like a photography book about gestation, with gorgeous pictures of fetuses. He also assembles the mail-order bassinet we bought, whistling lullabies while he works. He even likes looking at all the baby outfits and teases Sophie about names he’d like her to consider: Grantina, Grantette, and Grantaluna are his top choices.

The best thing: The night before he and Nicky are to go back, Grant and I go out to a restaurant together, just the two of us. Nicky agrees to stay home with Sophie, and when we leave, the two of them are in the bed, watching television and eating take-out Chinese food.

Grant and I walk down to Seventeenth Street to a restaurant I have passed many times and always wanted to go into. It’s cozy and warm in there, with a jazz quartet in the back, and we sit knee to knee in our little booth, and we talk. We’re wary at first, but then the warmth, the wine, and just the fact that we’ve been apart for so long soften the edges of the conversation. He says the book is going fine, ahead of schedule actually, and that Clark has now announced to everyone that Grant is going to be the department chair. He’s lonely, though, he says. The winter has dragged on, and he’s run out of nearly everything in the house at least four times, including clean underwear. He’s had to start washing underwear every day in the shower and hanging it to dry for the following day.

“You do remember where we keep the washing machine? You’ve lived in that house since you were a baby,” I say, and he laughs. He can’t remember all the stuff he needs to buy. He’s been out of laundry detergent since week three.

“So let’s change this horrible subject. Tell me this: what have you been doing since you’ve been here?” he wants to know. “Do you just hang out in the apartment all the time?”

“Mostly,” I say. “I mean, I go to the market every day, and sometimes I go and sit in the park.”

“It’s scaring me a little, how much you like it here,” he says, but he’s smiling.

“I do like it. I always did like living in New York. I mean, I like New Hampshire, too, but sometimes I think …”

“What?” he says. He leans closer.

“Just that New Hampshire was best for me when we had kids at home. We had the whole community around us then. I felt as though we were part of something. Now—without them, I guess I’ve just lost my footing lately.”

“Huh! And I thought it was my book that was making you so miserable.”

“Well, yes. God, yes. The way it sucks you up. But, you know, I think it’s more than that. I was telling my therapist that I feel as though I got fired from my job.”

He smiles and looks right at me. “You didn’t get fired. You did it right, and got promoted.”

“That’s what she said. I just have to figure something else out, that’s all. Being here has shown me that I need more contact with the outside world, and not just with the other faculty wives. I mean, I like them fine, but the other day when I handed in my book, I took the subway and went to the publisher’s office, and that’s when I realized what I’ve been missing. Colleagues.”

“Colleagues,” he says.

“Yes. I haven’t got it all figured out yet, but I’m thinking that Sophie is going to need some help with the baby, and maybe I can go back and forth—you know, spend some time here each month. I could talk to my editor about taking on a series …”

“Will I be included in this new life of yours?” he says.

“Play your cards right, mister, and you could be,” I say.

We walk back to Sophie’s, hand in hand, in the spring night. When we get to the door, he pulls me over and kisses me. “How many Wednesdays do you figure we’ve missed out on by now?”

“Grant, honey, don’t take this the wrong way, but I think when I get back we need to suspend the Wednesday program.”

He makes his eyes go round with mock alarm. “What are you
saying
? No more sex?”

“No more scheduled sex. I want spontaneous sex. When it doesn’t feel like part of a to-do list. ‘Clean gutters. Recaulk bathtub. Have sex with Annabelle.’”

He thinks about this, stroking my face and smiling. “I only did it for you, so at least you’d know that no matter how busy I got, we’d have that time.”

“Well, thanks but no thanks. You know what I mean? I might want it three times a week sometimes. I may want it three times in one day!”

“Now that could be a problem,” he says, and laughs.

He’s standing close and pressing against me, smiling. He’s looser than I remember. And he smells good.

“You know what?” I say. “I like you this way.”

“What way?”

“When you miss me. When you’re not looking at me like I’m just some impediment to keep you from writing your book.”

He laughs. “I do miss you. Even all your crazy conversations about people’s sex lives. Speaking of which, do you suppose there’s any way of maybe celebrating the demise of our Wednesday morning sex program … now? Before I leave?”

But of course there isn’t, short of the radical act of going to a hotel. Hard to do with grown children paying attention to your every move. The fact is, with the way this apartment is configured, I have had to sleep in the bed with Sophie, and Grant and Nicky have had to take the sofa bed in the living room. So instead, we kiss long and hard in the lobby, and for once he doesn’t even seem to mind that people rushing by on the sidewalk can look in and see everything.

LATER, I wish we’d taken the radical step of going to a hotel. I wish we’d gone to a hotel, and then Grant had just vaporized himself back to New Hampshire.

The next morning, before they leave for the drive back, I wake up early and make a breakfast of scrambled eggs with spinach and feta cheese, tomatoes, and toast.

I’m so preoccupied with cooking and bringing things into the bedroom for our last picnic breakfast that I almost don’t realize as I’m going back and forth that Sophie is smiling and talking about me. Why hadn’t it occurred to me that this might happen? That this would come up?

“Poor Mom,” she’s saying when I come in with the pot of coffee. “She’s been so lonely here with just me to manage, after she’s been accustomed to all her waifs and strays.”

“Please,” I say. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I’ve been fine. More than fine.”

“I’m shocked she hasn’t been able to find any waifs and strays in New York,” says Grant, smiling. “Are you telling me nobody in this building needs her services? Nobody on the subway, even?”

“Well, actually,” Sophie says. “Some of my girlfriends came by at first to get counseled about their bad boyfriends. And oh, wait. She did find herself one waif on her own—actually an old friend of yours! Boy, is he a sad sack if there ever was one! He should be nominated the quintessential waif and stray for all times.”