“No shit. You were fucking another guy at the same time you were fucking me. At least with you, I was honest. I told you I was married, so I was honest about my infidelity. But you?” As angry I feel about Laurel sleeping with another guy, it pales to my anger knowing I’m not Anne Elise’s biological father. I sneer, get up from the rocking chair. “Trish wants me to kill you.”
“Kill me?” Laurel gulps. Her forehead glistens with perspiration. A disarming clarity comes over her eyes. She sits on the floor, crosses her legs, and lays her palms upon her knees as if to summon strength through meditation. She breathes in deeply, holds the breath, and chokes back her tears. “I was lonely and had no real friends in the world. The guy meant nothing to me beyond a warm cuddle and a chance not to be alone for a night. I was so glad when I met you. You looked at me as if I was more than just a piece of ass. You asked my feelings about things and cared about what I thought. That was new to me. You cared about me. The other guy never did. I fell in love with you. I’m no dumb-dumb, no fly-by-night skank. You are the man I want to spend the rest of my life with. I love you. You love me. I didn’t want to risk you turning your back on me if I told you about the other guy. Can you blame me? It’s you I want to be with, not any other guy.”
“You do meditation?” I ask. We know so little about each other, relying on gut instinct to fill in the particulars of each other’s interests and delights. I wouldn’t have thought Laurel was into meditation or yoga or any of those mindfulness exercises that are becoming popular, but now that she’s in the lotus position, I can see how she’d be drawn to vaguely Eastern, vaguely spiritual practices. Things that are vaguely pure or at least less susceptible to corruption. What kind of fool am I? How could I have gotten so involved with someone I barely know? And how can I get myself out of this situation?
Laurel brushes her hand against her sweat-drenched forehead. “I don’t meditate as often as I should.”
“Why’d you tell the cops that you thought I’d—what?—kidnapped Anne Elise?”
Laurel looks up, bewildered. In a previous life, she would have been a free-love spirit decked out in hippy-dippy tie-dye hemp sandals and love beads, seeking the good vibrations of an ashram or the rainy, muddy chaos of Woodstock. She lifts her palms from her knees, buttons the top button of her peacoat. “What are you talking about?”
“The police. Trish called and said detectives were swarming around the house, trying to find me. Apparently, they’re looking for me.”
“Why would they be looking for you?”
“Don’t bullshit me.”
Laurel stands up, lays an arm against the bright-yellow wall to steady herself. She closes her eyes and winces as if in pain and the mere act of pulling herself to a standing position winded her. “I’m not bullshitting you.”
“Trish said you told them I took Anne Elise. Until she called me, I didn’t know Anne Elise was missing.”
“I’m not bullshitting you. I never said anything like that.”
“But Trish said—”
“How do you know Tricia’s telling the truth?”
I tell Laurel that Trish’s my wife, that we’ve been married a dozen years and at the very least she’s never misled or deceived me as badly as Laurel has. And now I see it in my mind: tomorrow morning, I’ll go back to Trish, sit her down on the Hepplewhite, and tell her how sorry and foolish I’ve been. I’ll light a fire in the fireplace, brew her a carafe of chamomile tea, and pledge never to stray again. I’ll throw myself at her mercy. Trish will know what to do. We’ve traveled the far ends of this earth together. We’ve chartered private jets to see wonders few other Americans are lucky enough to experience: the white sands of Fiji, Easter Island’s megalithic moai statues, genuine Inuit igloos on Baffin Island. I’ve not known Trish to lie. She can be exacting, demanding, merciless even when guarding her personal finances, but she doesn’t stoop to dishonesty. But as I’m thinking this, Laurel’s looking straight at me, the earnestness of her gaze piercing straight through me, and then, as if I’m walloped by an uncomfortable awareness, it hits me that Laurel is right—not one but two women have been playing me, lying to me, using me.
“You’ve got to trust me,” Laurel says. “Within weeks of meeting you, I stopped seeing that other guy. I don’t know whose baby it is. It could be yours; it could be his, but even before I knew I was pregnant, I stopped seeing the other guy. Honest.”
What Laurel says shocks me. Ever since Simpkins revealed those pictures of Laurel in another guy’s arms, I assumed there was no way I could be Anne Elise’s father. But a single picture proves nothing. Though Simpkins couldn’t retrieve them, Laurel’s taken dozens of pictures of me with her phone. She’s stopped people on the boulevards we’ve walked and in the parks we’ve strolled and handed them her phone so they could snap photos of us. But can Laurel actually have stronger feelings for that other guy? Is that why she kept his pictures but deleted those that she took of me? But more importantly, can I really be Anne Elise’s father?
“I’m scared,” Laurel says. “What’s going to happen to Zerena?”
“Zerena?”
“Anne Elise,” Laurel says, correcting herself. In the minutes since stepping into this frigid room, her rosy cheeks have turned porcelain pale again. She shivers and, in a weaker voice, asks, “Can you shut the window? I’m catching cold or something.”
“Sure.” I get up from the rocking chair. The window slides shut easily.
When I turn around, Laurel’s taken my seat on the rocking chair. She’s still shivering, still cold. She stretches out her hand, looks around the room, and her face gets sad. “How did we get like this?”
Instinctively, I know what she means. No baby rests in the crib, no permanence affixes itself to our lives. We’re living in-between lives, dodgy, precarious moments that threaten to evaporate as soon as one of us decides to walk away from the other. We’re two smart people who’ve dillydallied ourselves into this situation where neither of us is sure what’s going on. All along, I’ve been trying not to make a choice between Laurel and Trish, reasoning that as long as I didn’t back myself into choosing one or the other, I could have both. Several times I’ve stopped myself and tried to imagine who I’d be with in another few months. Sometimes, I see myself back in Savory Mew, content with the fine clothes and fine wines Trish plies me with; on other days, I see myself in this apartment or some eventual homeless shelter living off nothing but Laurel’s and Anne Elise’s abundant love.
Ideally, you should accept happiness as it comes, but happiness is the most relative of all emotions: no matter how happy you might be, the mind always swerves to other situations that could make you even happier; no matter if I see myself with Laurel or Trish, I always imagine myself being happier if the other were true. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” That’s what we were doing, “functioning.” You can learn everything about America through Fitzgerald, but nothing in his stories and novels could’ve prepared me for this.
“Do you really think the baby might be mine?”
“Yes. I asked my doctors. We’ve gone over ovulation charts, figured out when my last period was. It’s a fifty-fifty thing. As near as I can tell, our baby was conceived either the first time I made love with you or the last time I was with that other guy. We can get a paternity test if you want,” Laurel says, nervously. “And then, if you’re not the father, I’d understand if—”