He nods again and says, “Yes. Maybe you’re the one who isn’t happy. In fact . . . I can’t remember the last time you seemed happy. First it was that you worked too much and were overwhelmed and resented the professors without kids who didn’t understand your situation. So I tell you to quit, that we will be fine without two incomes. So you do. And now. Now you seem bored and frustrated and annoyed by mothers who care too much about tennis or post inane Facebook updates or expect you to make homemade snacks for school parties. Yet you still fret about all of those things. You still play their game.”
I try to interrupt, try to defend myself, but he continues with more conviction. “You wanted another baby. Desperately. Enough that sex turns into a project. A nose-to-the-grindstone project. Then you have Frankie and you seem on the edge. Postpartum. Miserable.”
“I wasn’t postpartum,” I say, still focusing on the sting of his description of our sex, awash with remorse and inadequacy and fear. “I just had the baby blues.”
“Fine. Fine. And I understand that. I understand how hard it was. Which is why I took the early morning feeding. Why we hired Carolyn.”
“I know,” I say. “Nobody’s ever accused you of being a bad father.”
“Okay. But look. The point is—I don’t feel like I’ve changed. I feel like I’ve stayed the same. I’m a surgeon. That’s who I am.”
“That’s who you are, yes. But that’s not all you are. You’re also my husband. Ruby and Frank’s father.”
“Right, I know. I know. But why does that mean I have to have a full social calendar? And that my kids have to go to a fancy private school? And that my wife has to be consumed with what other people think of us?”
“That’s how you see me?” I ask, my tears at their final tipping point. “As some kind of a lemming?”
“Tess. No. I don’t see you as a lemming. I see you as a smart, beautiful woman who . . .”
I begin to cry as he reaches over to touch my hand. “Who what?” I ask through tears.
“Who . . . I don’t know . . . Tess . . . Maybe something has changed in our life. I’ll grant you that. I just don’t think that thing is me.”
I look at him, feeling light-headed, the weight of his words making it difficult for me to breathe. It is the admission I have been driving for and now that I have it, I have no idea what to do with it.
“Maybe it is partly my fault,” I somehow manage to say, too afraid to ask about the text or anything else about Valerie. “But I still love you.”
(
Several seconds pass—seconds that feel like hours—before he replies, “I love you, too, Tess.”
I look at him, holding on to the edge of the table and his words, wondering what kind of love we’re talking about and whether it will be enough.
36
Valerie
She waits. And waits. And waits some more. She waits for ten excruciating days, the longest stretch of time she can remember, almost as agonizingly slow as the early days at the hospital. She stares at her BlackBerry, sleeping with it next to her pillow, the ringer on high. She parts the curtains, looking for his car whenever she hears a door slam outside. And when she can’t bear the waiting and wondering another second, she even breaks down and sends him a text that simply says, Hope you’re okay? She adds the question mark for the sole purpose of requesting a response, but she still hears nothing from him. Not a single word.
At first she gives him the benefit of the doubt she believes he’s earned, coming up with all sorts of excuses on his behalf. There’s been an emergency at work or at home. Someone’s hurt. He’s hurt. And the most implausible scenario of all—that he told his wife he is in love with another woman, that he is unwinding his marriage, filing for divorce, wishing for a clean break before they continue, together, on an honest, true path.
She feels foolish for even conceiving of such a notion (let alone dreaming about it, and once, in an especially desperate moment, even praying for it) when she knows what is far more likely. That he regretted what they did and what he told her. Or worse, that he didn’t mean it in the first place.
The emotions send her reeling back in time, to what she has come to call her stupid years, before she learned to protect herself with a wall of distrust and cynicism and apathy. The wounds Lion inflicted, wounds that she thought had healed long ago, are suddenly fresh and raw. She begins to hate him all over again, because it is easier than hating Nick. But she hates herself most of all—for being the kind of woman who gets herself in these situations.
“What is wrong with me?” she says, when she breaks down one bleak Tuesday afternoon at work, calling her brother, confessing what she did with Nick, and that she hasn’t seen him since, hasn’t even heard from him since his obligatory morning-after call.
“Nothing is wrong with you” her brother says, sounding halfasleep or stoned—maybe both.
“Something is wrong with me,” she says, staring out her office window into another office across the block, where two men are literally standing next to a water cooler, laughing. “He had sex with me once, then ended things.”
“He didn’t exactly end things. He just hasn’t. . . followed up ...”
“It’s the same difference. And you know it.”