The Stuff That Never Happened Page 4

  “I certainly hope this is going to be one of those breakthrough moments for the book,” I say. “Are we postponing our orgasms for some good reason at least?”

  He waves me off. He doesn’t like the word orgasm; he once told me it’s an ugly word, and that it makes the sex act sound like something clinical.

  “Listen,” I say after a moment, as he turns the paper over and writes on the back. “What do you say we just pretend that this is Tuesday instead of Wednesday, shall we?”

  “Wait.” He keeps writing for a few seconds more, and then he stops and stares at me as though he can’t quite remember what I just said. He clears his throat. “What? Tuesday? You want it to be Tuesday?”

  “Yes. This is ridiculous. Let’s shake hands and meet here again tomorrow morning. Or—what the hell—even next Wednesday. Or better yet, in the spring.”

  “All right, all right. It’s now officially Tuesday,” he says, missing the point entirely, and you can’t tell me it’s not on purpose. And then the book, victorious, decides that was quite enough human conversation, thank you, and reaches up a long, slippery, octopus arm and pulls him back into the smoky unfairness of Factory World. When I get out of bed a few minutes later and head to the shower, he’s writing furiously.

  Which is fine. Perfectly understandable. We’ve been married practically forever, as I may have mentioned. You can have an off year, especially a year when you’re writing a book—but you have to talk about it. That’s all I’m saying. And it’s fine to skip making love, even after you’ve made a big deal about setting up a schedule—but don’t you have to acknowledge that it meant something to you, that it was a loss, no matter how tiny?

  I pull on my terry-cloth bathrobe—I, at least, don’t run around naked when it’s so cold in our bedroom that you can see your breath—and head to the bathroom. I pee and brush my teeth and then, just before I get in the shower, I find myself staring in the mirror. My forty-nine-year-old face looks back at me, and even with all its morning creases and puffiness, it’s a face I’ve at last come to accept. I used to think my skin wasn’t smooth enough, but now I don’t care. It looks as if somebody has drawn pencil lines around my hazel eyes, which were always my best feature, and my wild mass of curly dark blond hair that I spent years trying to tame into sleekness is now cut to shoulder length with highlights to cover the gray strands, thanks to L’Oréal. But it’s okay, good enough. So much that used to seem so important—abolishing crow’s-feet and occasional gray hairs—really doesn’t matter at all.

  I lean forward into the mirror. Jeremiah, I am going to be a grandmother! Can you believe it? Me—the one you said was the youngest person you ever slept with? I am almost fifty years old now, Jeremiah, so I don’t even want to think of how old you are. But I’m okay. I mean, I could stand to lose ten pounds, but I refuse to be one of those women who thinks about that all the time. I have things on my body now that a man can hang on to: real hips and boobs. Possibly even some back fat, I’m not sure. I won’t let myself look.

  This is very bad, talking to Jeremiah in the mirror. It’s bad enough when my mind goes off on its own and constructs a whole scenario about him while I’m sleeping, but his presence absolutely must be chased out of my waking thoughts. I poke out my stomach and pat it. Oh, this ten pounds could so easily turn to fifteen. The truth is, despite my brave talk about not caring about my appearance so much, I know that soon I’ll either need to think about losing some weight or start buying underwear that’s made of industrial materials. I won’t be able to stand myself.

  When I get out of the shower and walk back across the hall to get dressed, Grant is still sitting up in bed, scrawling on my mother’s stationery. He puts down the paper and takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes hard. “This book is killing me,” he says.

  “You and me both,” I tell him. I put on my bra, snapping it in the front and then sliding it around and up over my breasts, once known around here as the Girls. I have to lean forward to tuck them in, which makes me feel a little self-conscious. But when I turn, I see that Grant is not even watching me. Instead, he’s picked up his piece of paper again and is reading it while he talks.

  “You know something?” he says. “Tonight, don’t even wait for me for dinner. I think I’ll stay in my office and grade those freshman essays. And then I can work on chapter five without being interrupted. That’s what’s killing me here—these constant interruptions.”

  “Actually,” I say, and feel a shameful flicker of satisfaction—really, this is one of my worst qualities, smugness—“as you may remember, tonight we’re having dinner with the Winstanleys. At the Villager.” Clark Winstanley is the head of the history department; he’s the one newly married to the grad student. Rumor has it that he’s arranged a series of dinners to reassure the faculty and their spouses that he’s still in his right mind. Either that or he’s showing off his total splendiferousness in being able to land such a young chick. The faculty wives are mixed on their verdicts.

  Grant’s face is filled with dismay. “Are you kidding me? That’s tonight?”

  “Yep.”

  “But I’ve got to work!”

  “Yeah, well, some would say this is your work.”

  “Gah! Doesn’t he have anything better to do than parade around showing off his stupidity? He might as well just pull out his dick and challenge everybody to a pissing match. Why do I have to suffer because some bastard decides to have a midlife crisis?”

  “Because this particular bastard is your chairman, maybe?”

  “For Christ’s sake. I do not want to have to think about his sex life!”

  I laugh. “This isn’t going to be a dinner to think about Clark’s sex life. This is a dinner so that Clark can try to make everything seem normal. All you have to do is talk about the usual topics and behave yourself. Trust me.”

  “What’s her name again?”

  “Padgett.”

  “Padgett. Right. I would’ve guessed Brittany or Tiffany, something of that ilk.”

  He runs his hands through his hair and looks longingly—some would say even with lust—at the piece of paper he’s been furiously scribbling on. He purses and unpurses his lips, sighs, throws his arms up to heaven, beseeches the fates through clenched teeth, and finally stomps off to the shower.

  Oddly enough, I feel happy for the first time this morning. At least we’re going out. And Grant has to go along.

  “SO DID you know that Clark Winstanley was dumping his wife before he went and did it?” I say to Grant on the way to the restaurant. “Do men talk about these things?”

  I have to say, I’m a little bit obsessed right now with people who chuck their old lives out the window. There’s something sick about this, I know, but I’ve never felt better about stuffy old Clark Winstanley.

  “What?” he says. “What things?”

  “Did you know that Clark was divorcing Mary Lou? Because I’ve been wondering what men say to other men when they’re thinking about something big like this.”

  Grant peers out into the snowy darkness, probably doing a calculation about how many flakes per minute are falling, and whether in a moment he might have to turn on the windshield wipers. He hates to use the wipers; you would think it actually cost extra money to run them. It drives me crazy, this miserliness with windshield wipers. I can’t see the road when he’s driving, I tell him, and he replies that I don’t have to see the road. I can sit there and be relaxed, knowing he’s never had so much as a fender bender.

  “So did he say anything to you specifically? Did you sense anything?”

  “God, Annabelle.” He laughs harshly. “I have no idea.”

  “It seems you’d remember something like a guy saying, ‘I’m breaking up with my wife.’ Or maybe you’d even see the new woman hanging around. Did she ever come to department meetings?”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “What?”

  “Thinking about these people this way, when it’s none of your busin
ess.”

  “It has nothing to do with whose business it is,” I say to him. “It’s the human condition, Grant. Women care about these things. We talk about marriage. Did you even know that? Women are hungry to talk about these things with men. I want to know what you think!”

  “Sometimes …” he says with a sigh.

  “Sometimes what?”

  “Nothing. Sometimes I just wish you weren’t so silly.”

  My mouth actually drops open, and I have to concentrate on closing it again. I look out the window and do not speak to him until well after we’ve arrived at the restaurant, which is quite elegant, with thick carpets and a massive fireplace and honey-colored hurricane lamps on the tables, the kind of place with huge padded booths and plaques on the wall. Clark and the grad student are already sitting at a table, side by side, only she’s turned away from him and is looking down at something in her lap while he sits and watches her and sips a drink. He drinks manhattans, straight up, as I recall from twenty-three years of faculty parties.

  Silly! What a word. I can’t get over Grant calling me that.

  Clark jumps to his feet and kisses me on both cheeks, and then he introduces us to La Wife, even though of course I already know all about her via the grapevine. I know that she’s getting her master’s in environmental science and that her full name is Padgett Halverson-Winstanley, which sounds to me like three last names, and the word is that she’s not the traditional type of trophy wife, which is code for the fact that she’s not particularly beautiful or sexy. She’s the new breed of young wife, meaning she’s opinionated and brainy and scrappy and wears funky clothes, in the way that Mary Lou Winstanley, with her station wagon filled with her five kids and a whole bunch of soccer equipment, could never pull off. Clark met Padgett at a conference he organized. Soon after they met, she transferred to the college here, and then—voilà!—six months later he got a divorce from Mary Lou, who kept the house and the cars. I was never close friends with Mary Lou, who was a little bit cold to people she considered “outsiders” like me, but everyone said it was just awful for her to get dumped like that, like an old cloth coat. Still, when I see her in the grocery store these days, she looks just the same as ever, wearing jeans and sweatshirts with the college name on them, her short hair feathered out in wings. Somebody told me she got a great divorce settlement.

  Clark shakes Grant’s hand and then nudges Padgett, who remains seated, and I see that the reason she’s looking down is that she’s texting somebody on her cell phone. She looks up and gives us both a vacant smile and holds up one hand, but her other hand never stops its lightning-quick dance over the buttons of her phone, her thumb flashing two giant silver rings.

  “She’s arranging a meet-up for the environmental students,” Clark says by way of explanation, and I feel sorry for him, having to use words like meet-up when he means meeting, and also for the fact that you can just see in his face that he wishes she would sit up straight and talk to us. Don’t worry, I want to telegraph him. I know she’s not going to be the old kind of faculty wife, and it’s just fine with me.

  “Well!” he says. “It’s so lovely to see you, Annabelle. May I say that you’re looking quite … relaxed.”

  This is puzzling, and since I am anything but relaxed, I figure it is code for something. Relaxed, meaning tired? Relaxed, meaning that I’m letting myself go?

  “You look awfully relaxed, too, Clark,” I say, and Grant sits down, growling about how he’s not relaxed in the slightest.

  “You need a drink, then,” Clark says, summoning the waiter.

  “What I need are days that last thirty-six hours instead of twenty-four so I can get my work done,” Grant says. I kick him lightly under the table, which has always been our deal: I’m to remind him to be social if he seems to be acting like the curmudgeon he can be. He purses his lips but then mumbles something about a drink being a good idea, and Clark starts talking about the last time he and Padgett were here, which he remembers as being exceptionally good, and he nudges Padgett into agreeing with him. And then the conversation comes to the first of its many halts of the evening. Padgett’s phone lets out a little bleat, and she snatches it up and reads the screen. Clark takes another sip of his manhattan and the waiter takes our drink orders and slips away.

  I lean over and compliment Padgett on the exquisite silk scarf she’s wearing, and she tells me a little stiffly that it was made in Indonesia from silk produced by worms that are fed an organic diet of blah blah blah, and these are evidently happier silkworms than have ever been found in the history of the world. I say, “These are the silkworms who no doubt have health coverage and day care and profit sharing,” and she actually laughs. I feel Grant rolling his eyes—after all these years, I can feel his eye-rolling even if I’m not looking at him—but, screw him, I don’t care. After that, it’s easy to get Padgett to give all her many opinions, on everything from the melting polar ice caps to the vital importance of wearing organic cotton and eating vegan food.

  “So,” she says, definitely warming to me, “do you work, or do you just stay home and raise kids?”

  Clark, who looks as though he might slit his own throat, quickly leans over and tells her that I am actually a very fine, accomplished, award-winning book illustrator with lots and lots of books to my credit.

  “Oh, yes,” Grant says. “She’s just finished the illustrations on a fascinating treatise about a squirrel’s evening called Bobo and His Blankie Go to Bed.” He sees my face and quickly adds, “It’s a silly story, but Annabelle’s drawings are very lovely.”

  “I’m sure it’s wonderful,” says Clark.

  “Thank you, Clark. Grant thinks that now that the children are grown, I could be painting more serious things. He can’t face the fact that I like doing children’s books.”

  Grant makes some kind of protesting noise, but the waiter shows up just then and the subject fortunately gets dropped. Later, Padgett starts making fun of Clark for not knowing what tempeh was when she first met him; and then, when the wine, the food, and my smiling questions have all made her excruciatingly comfortable, she tells a funny, slightly off-color story about their wedding, involving a non-English-speaking hotel employee thinking Clark was really Padgett’s father! Imagine that. And this employee was sure that—ha-ha—the bride’s father was inappropriately trying to gain entrance to their bridal suite during what the clerk was sure was an intimate moment. So there was poor Clark, jiggling his card key in the lock while the employee is meanwhile trying to head him off and get rid of him while the youngsters seal the deal.

  When she’s finished, I laugh, but the two men sit there in silence. Grant grabs his drink, so he can hide his eyes behind the glass, I’m sure.

  Padgett looks around at their blank, even faces. “Like this guy had never seen an old guy marrying a young woman before?” she says, laughing. “And meanwhile, all you wanted was to get in your own hotel room, didn’t you, snoopy?”

  Snoopy?

  I’m surprised that Clark hasn’t tried to somehow stop her from telling this story. Instead, he lets out a high-pitched giggle and dives into the remains of his manhattan. I can’t help it, I start laughing, and then Padgett laughs, too, and Clark seizes her hand and says, “Well, on that note, shall we tell them our news, sweetheart?”

  Oh God, I think. They’re having a kid.

  I sit up straighter in my chair and am glad that I haven’t already drunk too much wine so I can sense the very fun nuances that I’m sure are coming my way. I can feel Grant tense up beside me, ready to ward off all discussions that might reveal anything that would cause any further thought about their sex life. He’s suffered enough.

  Padgett just shrugs and looks down at her lap, which probably means she’s reading her cell phone. I swear, this woman has had about a billion messages flashing back and forth through dinner—and I am enjoying an image of her in the delivery room texting away while she’s pushing the baby out, and also enjoying the idea that I am the firs
t person to get this news and wondering how people will take it.

  Clark clears his throat, and says in his momentous, department-chairman voice, “Wellll—you sure you don’t want to tell them, darling?” When she shakes her head, he says, “No? Well, then I will.” He takes a deep breath. “We’re taking a leave of absence and we’re going to travel the world!”

  Grant stares straight ahead.

  Now they’re kissing. Planting little tiny kisses all over each other’s faces. Clark pulls away, and his face is sweaty and he’s grinning, gums showing like mad, like he’s a fool for love, he’s so pleased with himself, and he says, “Padgett here hasn’t seen much of the world, so I have the pleasure of taking her to all my favorite places. And of course, we’re hoping to find a few of our own.” He puts his big bald forehead onto her smooth, unlined one, like a mind meld you’d see on Star Trek, and then they clink glasses, and, tardily, Grant and I toast them, too.

  And then Clark leans forward and says in a low voice to Grant, “I’m going to recommend that you take my place as acting chair.”

  I can feel the waves of dismay coming off Grant, as he tallies up all the time that little mission will take, in addition to his book and his three courses, and the essays he needs to grade. He clears his throat and says this is something he’ll have to think about.

  “It’s a career move that I think you’re ready for,” says Clark, which I know Grant will find to be the most condescending remark ever, given that he is two years older than Clark and was trained at Columbia and is definitely slumming it by teaching here at this tiny little college, and everybody knows it. “It won’t be until the fall semester, which will give you time to finish that book of yours, and who knows but by then you may want to goose up your résumé and maybe get some extra attention from all the important awards committees, eh?”