Lionel Shriver - We Need to Talk About Kevin

“That’s because if Celia said someone had messed with her, the situation would be far more grave than she let on. Celia is more likely to let some dirty old geez finger her for years because she doesn’t want to get the nice man in trouble.”

“I know what’s behind this: typical double standard. A girl gets pawed at and it’s ooh terrible put the sicko away. But a woman paws all over a boy and it’s gosh, lucky kid, gets his first taste, bet he really enjoyed it! Well, just because a boy responds—from physical reflex—doesn’t mean it can’t be a degrading, humiliating violation!”

“Professionally,” I said, pressing an index finger patiently to my forehead, “I may have been fortunate, but I’ve never thought of myself as all that bright. Kevin came by his intelligence from somewhere. So you must have at least considered the possibility that this whole thing was a sadistic frame-job.”

“Just because Lenny Pugh’s horning in on the show was bogus—”

“Lenny didn’t ‘horn in,’ he just didn’t learn his lines. He’s lazy, and a lousy drama student, apparently. But Kevin clearly put the other boys up to it.”

“ Balls —!”

“He didn’t have to call her ‘ugly.’” I shuddered, remembering. “That was twisting the knife.”

“Some nympho seduces our own son, and the only person you care about—”

“He made one mistake, did you notice? He said she locked the door. Then he claimed he ‘ran out’ after she had her way with him . Those doors don’t even lock, you know, from the inside. I checked.”

“Big deal she didn’t literally lock it! He obviously felt trapped. More to the point, why in God’s name would Kevin make that story up?”

“I can’t say.” I shrugged. “But this certainly fits.”

“With what?”

“With a wicked and dangerous little boy.”

You looked at me clinically. “Now, what I can’t figure is whether you’re trying to hurt me, or hurt him, or if this is some confused self-torture.”

“This evening’s witch trial was excruciating enough. We can knock out self-torture .”

“Witches are mythical. Pedophiles are real as sin. One look at that loon and you could tell she was unstable.”

“She’s a type,” I said. “She wants them to like her. She courts their favor by breaking the rules, by choosing racy plays and saying fuck in class. She may even like the idea of their ogling her a bit, but not at this price. And there’s nothing illegal about being pathetic.”

“He didn’t say she spread her legs and begged like Lenny Pugh, did he? No, she got a little carried away and crossed a line. He even kept his pants on. I could see it happening. That’s what convinced me. He wouldn’t make that part up about through his jeans .”

“Interesting,” I said. “That’s exactly how I knew he was lying.”

“Lost me.”

“Through his jeans. It was calculated authenticity. The believability was crafted. ”

“Let’s get this straight. You don’t believe his story because it’s too believable.”

“That’s right,” I agreed evenly. “He may be scheming and malicious, but his English teacher is right. He’s sharp as a tack. ”

“Did he seem as if he wanted to testify?”

“Of course not. He’s a genius.”

Then it happened. When you collapsed into the chair opposite, you did not come to a dead halt only because I had made up my mind and you could no more dislodge my conviction that Kevin was a Machiavellian miscreant than I could dislodge yours that he was a misunderstood choirboy. It was worse than that. Bigger. Your face sagged much as a short time later I would see your father’s droop as he emerged from his basement stairwell—as if all your features had been artificially held up by tacks that had suddenly fallen out. Why, at that moment you and your father would have appeared nearly the same age.

Franklin, I’d never appreciated how much energy you expended to maintain the fiction that we were a broadly happy family whose trifling, transient problems just made life more interesting. Maybe every family has one member whose appointed job is to fabricate this attractive packaging. In any event, you had abruptly resigned. In one form or another, we had visited this conversation countless times, with the habitual loyalty that sends other couples to the same holiday home every summer. But at some point such couples must look about their painfully familiar cottage and admit to each other, Next year we’ll have to try somewhere else.

You pressed your fingers into your eye sockets. “I thought we could make it until the kids were out of the house.” Your voice was gray. “I even thought that if we made it that far, maybe… But that’s ten years from now, and it’s too many days. I can take the years, Eva. But not the days.”

I had never so fully and consciously wished that I had never borne our son. In that instant I might even have forgone Celia, whose absence a childless woman in her fifties would not have known well enough to rue. From a young age there was only one thing I had always wanted, along with getting out of Racine, Wisconsin. And that was a good man who loved me and would stay true. Anything else was ancillary, a bonus, like frequentflier miles. I could have lived without children. I couldn’t live without you.

But I would have to. I had created my own Other Woman who happened to be a boy. I’d seen this in-house cuckolding in other families, and it’s odd that I’d failed to spot it in ours. Brian and Louise had split ten years before (all that wholesomeness had been a little meat-and-potatoes for him, too; at a party for his fifteenth wedding anniversary, a jar of pickled walnuts smashed on the floor, and he got caught fucking his mistress in the walk-in pantry), and of course Brian was far more upset about separation from those two blond moppets than about leaving Louise. There shouldn’t be any problem loving both, but for some reason certain men choose; like good mutual-fund managers minimizing risk while maximizing portfolio yield, they take everything they once invested in their wives and sink it into children instead. What is it? Do they seem safer, because they need you? Because you can never become their ex-father, as I might become your ex-wife? You never quite trusted me, Franklin. I took too many airplanes in the formative years, and it never entirely registered that I always bought a round-trip.

“What do you want to do?” I asked. I felt light-headed.

“Last out the school year, if we can. Make arrangements over the summer.

“At least custody is a no-brainer, isn’t it?” you added sourly. “And doesn’t that say it all.”

At the time, of course, we had no way of knowing that you would keep Celia, too.

“Is it—?” I didn’t want to sound pitiful. “You’ve decided.”

“There’s nothing left to decide, Eva,” you said limply. “It’s already happened.”

Had I imagined this scene—and I had not, for to picture such things is to invite them—I’d have expected to stay up until dawn draining a bottle, agonizing over what went wrong. But I sensed that if anything we would turn in early. Like toasters and sub-compacts, one only tinkers with the mechanics of a marriage in the interests of getting it up and running again; there’s not much point in poking around to see where the wires have disconnected prior to throwing the contraption away. What’s more, though I’d have expected to cry, I found myself all dried up; with the house overheated, my nostrils were tight and smarting, my lips cracked. You were right, it had already happened, and I may have been in mourning for our marriage for a decade. Now I understood how the mates of long senile spouses felt when, after dogged, debilitating visits to a nursing home, what is functionally dead succumbs to death in fact. A culminatory shudder of grief; a thrill of guilty relief. For the first time since I could remember, I relaxed. My shoulders dropped a good two inches. I sat into my chair. I sat. I may have never sat so completely. All I was doing was sitting.