Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

“Sy.”

“What, won’t he? You don’t think he will?”

Deb looked at him. “No, I really don’t.”

“Yeah, and you didn’t think he would at all, so that’s how much you know.”

Deb wavered a little in the air. Here was their son and they’d made him so angry. Jack, maybe mostly, but she had too. What would Simon say if she told him how she’d known already, known for months, and had done nothing. That she’d tried just to make it go away. Probably he’d say she was weak, and dumb. And what if Simon knew the facts about how his own parents’ marriage had started? Probably he’d say she was dirty. And deserving, now.

“If that’s how you feel,” she said. “He can stay out here, on the couch. Okay?”

Simon nodded. His mother’s face was damp from the water she’d splashed on it and he could see the pores on her cheeks in the light from the window. Again he’d been cruel.

The talk was over without Kay saying anything. If it had been left to her, she would have had her father stay at the studio. She was afraid of running into him in the kitchen or coming out from the bathroom. She was afraid of what he might try to say. The house seemed a so much safer place when it was just the three of them. But she never would have thought of what her brother said, about her father doing it again, she didn’t have a mind like his, and she guessed it was better that he had been the one to answer.

—

It was late, but still no one had really eaten, and so they ordered Chinese food, too much, enough for six or seven but more important, enough for four. Simon, then Kay, then Deb, marched a plate out to the living room to sit in front of the TV. Deb left the food containers and an empty plate on the counter like a live mouse trap, and before long Jack came creeping out from the back of the apartment where he’d spent the last half hour in a state of self-imposed but well-received quarantine. He took an empty space on the couch just behind Simon, who was stretched out on the floor, and neither child elected to break the tunnel vision that ran invisible between The Daily Show and their General Tso’s chicken.

Jack ate hunched over with great, heaping mouthfuls, like an animal afraid his food might be taken from him. The size of his portions offended Deb in some way she could hardly explain, and she caught herself scowling. She grew angrier watching him watch the television, his attention also nearly ravenous, invasive somehow. She was too angry for this, and regretted the peace offering, regretted it until Simon, at the first commercial, picked up his dinner, which he’d hardly touched, and left the room, stopping for no one, even when she called his name. Her son’s anger deflated her own, as though serving as her proxy, and Deb again felt sorry for Jack.

—

That night the kids kept clear of the hall for their father’s lonely procession, living room to bedroom to living room again, and Deb got into bed with the mangled pages, her husband’s words.

The dirty stuff didn’t bother her so much as when he was sweet, though she supposed that was a predictable thing to feel. Before a weekend trip to D.C., the girl had written to him that she didn’t like Washington, that everything about it had a hum. Jack wrote back, Hummmmmmmmmmmm. Thought of you the whole day.

Deb’s heart also quickened anytime she saw mention of herself on the page, and she always went back and read that section slowly, coming to her name in natural order. Deb’s asleep early. Just me in the living room, lonely for this afternoon. She wasn’t sure if it was out of superstition or if she got some sort of perverse pleasure in the delay, in making herself wait, but she did the same thing when she saw the names of her children. Promised to go to Kay’s play Friday. That was in November, and it hadn’t been a play but a dance concert.

There was a knock at the door, and Jack shuffled in to the closet where they kept extra bedding.

“I wish you wouldn’t keep looking at that.” He pulled down a gray blanket, one of those fleecy ones nobody liked the feel of, and was leaning forward on his toes, reaching further back. She watched him tug the corner of one toward the bottom and send the whole pile onto the floor. “Sorry,” he said, bending down and popping up again with a thin, yellowy quilt that might have been white when they bought it. “I saw on the calendar, Kay’s got a field trip?”

“So?”

“Mind if I pick her up?” The quilt had been Simon’s when they first moved him crib to bed, and she wondered if Jack realized, if that was why he chose it. Probably not, no.

“You do what you want.”

He nodded, quilt aloft, and went back out to the living room to sleep.

I want you to sit for me tomorrow around noon. Bring that belt from before. I’ll only have a couple hours but I think we can get to everything by then.

Ninety-two percent of Americans disapprove of extramarital affairs. Deb had done some research, online. Sixty-four percent would not forgive an unfaithful spouse, and sixty-two percent would divorce one. The site did not explain the other two percent, who neither forgave nor divorced. Catholics. Catholics or possibly black widows.

She’d taken her lawyer friend’s advice. She’d waited. Time was the trick everyone else knew already. Hold on long enough, let the heaviness dry in the air, and it does not seem necessary to do anything at all. Jack was fifty-five to her forty-one and had seen firsthand what time could do. “Do me a favor,” Ruth had whispered as the kids turned the bulbs on grandma’s menorah. “Don’t talk to him unless you’re sure.”

And in the interim, what had happened? The sex had gotten better. Or at least, they’d started having it again, rougher and for longer, even if sometimes she wanted to slap him across the face when he pinched. Deb made changes, but they were with herself, part of a decision to work at being happy.

Jack used to make her happy. She was twenty-six when they met, a young twenty-six. You had to choose between dancing and living, and up until that point she hadn’t lived. Her only boyfriends had worked in offices, done things with money she didn’t understand. They’d liked to show her off, hadn’t liked that she always went home early. They hadn’t known how to touch her, afraid of breaking her or, worse, wanting to. Jack had never been that way; he hadn’t had to be, and for that she gave herself willingly to him, throwing dance away just as it had begun to fail her, and it was a lot to ask of a person, maybe, to let you make them your whole world. His work she felt she understood, art that was like hers except it lasted, didn’t disappear behind a curtain. The best a dancer can do is bring life to another person’s steps. Jack didn’t have steps to follow. He made his own. An artist seemed the greatest thing one could be, also the purest, and her whole life shrunk next to that, her father the salesman, her mother the secretary. She hadn’t learned to look for the difference yet between what one did and who one was. Hadn’t even known there was a difference.

Things are usually described as better in the morning, and maybe they are, for some people. Jack preferred the night, when everything seemed at last to be at a close. He was out in the living room, yes, but he was home, and the day was over — the nightmare, he thought, over. There goes everything, the show, the career. There, my life. I’ll never speak to anyone again, not to the guy from the Voice or the woman from KIOSK, not to Stanley, not even to Nicky. But at least, sleep.

But then, morning, and instead of speaking to Stanley never again, here he was speaking to him now. Jack had wanted only to stop the incessant buzzing by his head, to shut off his phone’s alarm, but the alarm had started talking, and in a voice very much like Stanley’s.