Alix Ohlin - Signs and Wonders

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.

But this was not enough, and they both knew it. So she put Phoebe down, turned on the baby monitor, and said she was going out for milk. They didn’t need milk, but he wouldn’t check. He would grab, eagerly, at the chance to be alone with Phoebe for a little while, to prove himself a doting father.

She headed to Dilrod’s hotel, a corporate Sheraton fifteen minutes away. He should’ve been upstairs packing but was in the bar, just as she’d suspected. Dilrod’s drinking would only get worse, she knew, and the marriages, one after another, would fray just like his clothes, then fall apart. Either that or he’d find a woman who liked drinking with him, and then they would fray from the inside. This was his future.

“Hey,” she said, sitting down next to him.

“Look who it is,” said Dilrod. His tone snaked with menace. She hadn’t realized, until this moment, that he probably hated her; that he probably thought she was responsible for making Stefan different, less fun, more into weird movies and guilted-out about strip clubs. The idea hardly surprised her; she’d just never bothered to consider things from his point of view before.