Parts Unknown

Chapter 8





But I couldn’t help myself. Right after dropping Lucy off at preschool the next morning, I rushed to a bookstore. Thank goodness Barnes & Noble at the Grove shopping center opened at 9 am. I couldn’t believe Josh had written a bestseller, and I hadn’t even noticed. Geez, there was even a whole publisher’s display at the entrance to the children’s section. I’d probably walked past that bright red cardboard display half a dozen times, heading in there with Lucy to kill half an hour while she dismantled sticker books, and I had to pay for them.

I picked it up, curious. Weighed it in my hand. It was a little heavier than a few sticks of dynamite. Recklessly, I flipped it right open to the inside back cover. Might as well get it over with first thing. Yes—there he was, in full color. Staring right at me, his head tilted to one side, eyes squinting a little. He was so beautiful. I glanced at the biography paragraph quickly, but it didn’t really register: all that mattered was seeing his face.

I needed to read this book, right now. Touch, through writing, the most intimate part of Josh I could. Toting my purchase in its crinkly green bag, I strode, fast, to the nearby Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, recklessly purchased a large Chai Tea Ice Blended, and sat on one of the little benches inside the door—there was no room for tables in the tiny shop. I had three hours till I needed to pick up Lucy. Plenty of time.

It was like Harry Potter, mixed with superheroes—two concepts that your average ten year old would find irresistible. It was a tale of a school for super heroes (“supers,” they called themselves)—a place where kids with freakish abilities were sent to be among their own kind, where they learned to harness their powers and defeat evil. They lived in high-rise-style dormitories, with two sets of elevators, one leading to the girls’ area, one to the boys’. Downstairs was a warren of classrooms, auditoriums, and a dining hall. Many high-jinks ensued—elevators caused to go sideways instead of up and down; teachers stranded in the space-time continuum in retaliation for providing too much homework; entire meals turned to gelatin by the force of one unfortunate superhero’s sole power. Due to the destructive nature of the supers’ abilities, the entire building had to be completely flame-proof, invisibility-proof, explosion-proof, and drown-proof.

The young supers were properly angst-ridden about being estranged from their families, being born freaks and all. They resented being forced to learn fiendishly complicated ways to control their own minds and hence, their recalcitrant bodies. The plot thickened when a group of thirteen-year-olds discovered a competing nearby school, a place unknown to anyone, and in fact cloaked by invisibility. In this secret spot, renegade supers were being trained to become dark anti-heroes with a view to gaining control of the world. The supers would have to band together, contrary to the orders of their fuddy-duddy teachers, who refused to believe there was a dark plot afoot. The fate of the world rested in their hands. Oh, it was such fun. Thrilling, humorous, deft. It was, surprisingly enough, the book Josh was meant to write.

It was Monday. Five days till Saturday, at 2 pm, when I would manage to get back to that very Barnes & Noble, via some excuse. I had to see him.

~ ~ ~

Don’t think I hadn’t Googled Josh before now. When our relationship had ended, I’d put him away in a compartment in my mind, but that didn’t mean I’d forgotten him. He was always there, and I fantasized every so often that we’d meet again somehow, in some improbable situation—perhaps as senior citizens, on board a cruise ship, forty years hence. Our eyes would catch each others’ near the railing as we hobbled by, propped on our respective canes. We’d reminisce distantly about our youth, carefully sidestepping any mention that we’d once been in love. In other words: I was so disheartened I couldn’t even have decent reunion fantasies.

The thing was, he never showed up in my searches. A search several years ago for “Joshua Barnes” turned up an English scholar on Wikipedia (how appropriate!), the Facebook page of a pimply 17-year-old Wisconsin high school student, and a LinkedIn bio for a Unix administrator in Illinois. My Josh didn’t seem to exist, anywhere in the universe as indexed by Google. Maybe I’d made him up. A few botched photographs and email printouts constituted my only proof that he was real.

The problem was, real or not, I had never stopped loving him. I was convinced: you only get one soulmate, in this life. I had been fortunate to meet mine, as so many others hadn’t. And, even more amazing, I could have another chance. I could see him, at least, and remember.

By the time I picked up Lucy from preschool, I’d made it about a third of the way through Supers, and had craftily concealed it at the far back of my pajama drawer. I was still figuring out how I’d manage to sneak off to Josh’s book signing, but I had a more pressing plan for the next day: find out everything I could about Josh. Walking from the parking lot, through the security gates, and into the hallway to wait for Ms. Marcie to open the classroom door, signaling that school was over for the day, I only distantly noticed the other parents. The interlocking linoleum tiles on the floor caught my interest more than Christine and Jennifer. They were co-room parents for Ms. Marcie’s class. As from the bottom of a well, I heard them animatedly discussing plans for the class Easter party on Friday. Who would buy what. Sign-up sheets. Cupcakes. Plastic eggs. Other waiting parents chimed in. Nick, the cool stay-at-home dad, would make balloon animals. Jennifer wondered if frosted cupcakes would have too much refined sugar. Marjorie, the earthy-crunchy mom, suggested carrot sticks with dip, instead. I shook my head, irritated. They might as well be on Mars. For the love of god: who cared?

I was busy. In the tiles I could imagine whole worlds, each square another scene in the half-formed life I’d begun envisioning with me and Josh, together again. In one tile: our reunion. In the next: passionate lovemaking. Another tile had us dining leisurely at a romantic restaurant, gazing dreamily into each others’ eyes as we had so long ago. Conveniently, Lucy and George didn’t exist in these fantasies. I wasn’t sure whether they existed at all. Those squares were so compelling, they had the power to obliterate everyday life.

I realized with a start that the classroom door had been open for a few minutes now, and parents were filing out with their respective offspring, holding them by the hand, sometimes dragging them, juggling lunch boxes, art projects, and siblings in strollers. I hurried in to find Lucy, happily paging through one of those thick cardboard books featuring farm animals. “What noise does the duck make?” I asked, automatically. “Quack, quack!” squealed Lucy promptly. “Hey, guess what Mommy? We made bunnies today. It’s spring time! It’s Easter, coming up! Can we have an egg hunt?”

“Of course, honey. Just like we did last year. We’ll have an egg hunt in the front yard.” All the while, I was bundling her into her jacket, and grabbing her lunch, and holding the artwork away from me with two fingers—the Elmer’s glue was still damp. The bunny had several too many googly eyes—Lucy loved those things and would stick them everywhere.

“So tell me about your day,” I continued, shepherding her to the car. It was amazing that I was even able to speak. My mind was still a million miles away. But my daily life was so routine, I could live it even sleepwalking. Lucy began with the day’s highlight: “And Mark wouldn’t share the trike, and he kept hogging it up, until then, guess what, he fell off! ’Cause he was going too fast. And so he scraped his knee, and it was bleeding, and he cried so much! So Abigail called him a crybaby, and then he got so mad, Mommy, you wouldn’t believe it, he hit Ms. Marcie! He smacked her leg! And so then Ms. Marcie made him go to Mrs. Colfax’s office . . .” Lucy’s tale continued as I buckled her into her car seat, its cow print now permanently stained by milk and juice spills. I only had to nod, and laugh, and ask a few questions—“So what was your favorite part about making the bunny?” to get us safely home.

We read a library book about magic tap shoes, so insipid I couldn’t remember what I was reading even while reading it, and I got her ready for her nap. The only thing she would wear at nap time was a nightie she’d had since she was two—it didn’t even cover her underwear anymore. So long as she slept, she could wear a gold lamé tutu for all I cared. Nap time was my most precious time of the day—a god-given hour and a half when Lucy was there, but I needn’t be constantly aware of her.

I eagerly fished Supers out from the back of the p.j. drawer and recommenced reading. The more I read, the farther I sunk into an abyss I had no wish to claw my way out of. I remembered the power his words had had over me—a power long-forgotten, shoved away. Back, now. The sensuous way he shaped sentences, the way his punctuation was so exact yet unexpected. He could make love to me, just with words, in a book for children. The more I read, the more aroused I got, until, my face burning, I had to shove the book away. What kind of sicko gets off on G-rated young adult fiction?

I could fill up the rest of nap time, no problem: a film reel of Josh’s Greatest Hits started playing constantly in my head. It had been ten years, so of necessity the edges were fuzzy and the figures rather indistinct. Now that I had memorized Josh’s crisp author photo, though, I could mentally Photoshop his face onto the blurred body. Oh, look, this was a good scene: us, smooching in Hampstead Heath on the day after we’d met. In fact, I could replay that entire day constantly in my head—the dizzy anticipation, the desire, the day that never ended. The day I fell in love for the first time.

I heard a wail from the next room. It was one of Lucy’s peculiarities that she always awoke—in the morning and from her naps—crying. As if reality was a horrifying substitute for a loose, lovely dream world she didn’t want to leave.

That afternoon, Lucy and I would keep busy, like always. We’d have snack time, and story time, and coloring time. Maybe we’d drive to the Fairfax branch library and get our allotted ten children’s books. All marking time till tomorrow, when I’d begin researching the next phase of my life, in earnest.

In the meantime, I set her up in front of the easel I kept in the corner of the living room. It had been standing there forlorn, waiting for some inspiration that never came, for several years. It was Lucy’s now: I’d clamped a big newsprint pad to it, and I loved to watch her draw. She drew with so much energy and conviction—without self-editing or criticism of any kind. She knew exactly what she wanted to create, and with her fist closed vise-like around the fat Crayola washable marker, she created her own worlds of stick ballerinas, enormous faces with googly bug eyes, and exuberant dashed-off squiggles. She reminded me of myself as an eight or nine year old, enclosed in my upstairs room, with whole free weekend afternoons available to draw, draw, draw. I’d scarf scratch-paper pads from downstairs, or empty ruled accounting ledgers—whatever I could find—and sit there for hours with colored pencils, drawing fairy-mermaid hybrids and outrageous fashion designs. I’d get so tired by the end of the afternoon, after dozens of sketches, but I’d keep on, hoping for the revelation and excitement that maybe the next one, or the next, might provide. As if I kept drawing I could transport myself inside the paper itself, into a universe created and imagined wholly by me. As if I could have that kind of power.

“Mommy, look!” Lucy had haphazardly torn her latest piece from the pad, leaving a long trailing vee of newsprint in her wake. “It’s a picture of you. It’s from me!”

I looked like a demented alien, with eyes askew, one enormous, one tiny. Corkscrews of hair spiraled defiantly from my saucer-shaped head. “Honey, it’s beautiful.” I gave her a huge hug. “I’ll treasure it forever.”

~ ~ ~

I worried while preparing dinner how I’d even be able to look George in the eye when he came home, my head so full of obscene lovemaking fantasies I couldn’t even properly measure out the pasta, and ended up making enough for three nights’ worth. Just like that, in one day my entire view of George had changed. It was like holding a piece of wrinkled wax paper in front of my face. Without the wax paper, everything was crystal clear and super simple. I was a nice, boring person married to a solid, tenured statistics professor. We had a lovely daughter and lived in a rent-controlled apartment in a desirable location in Los Angeles. I had a comfortable life, an understanding husband, and mornings of freedom to do whatever I chose. Pretty awesome.

But raise the wax paper and everything assumed distorted, blurry proportions. That pleasant-seeming tenured professor was a warden holding me prisoner in a life that wasn’t anything I wanted or understood. The little apartment forced me to spend insufferable amounts of time with my nearby mother-in-law, and I walked through my days like a zombie. I lived the life many would envy, but it wasn’t the life I wanted. I had thought I loved George yesterday, but today what I felt seemed a self-serving sham. I’d married him so I wouldn’t have to be Vivian any longer. I could be his pet, his conquest, anything so I wouldn’t have to keep trying, and looking, and wanting things I couldn’t have.

Lucy was the only thing I’d ever wanted that I’d gotten to keep. Even though she kept me trembling daily on the verge of exhaustion, I still loved her more than anything. No imaginary waxed paper goggles would change my love for her.

But twenty-four hours was all it took to distort how I felt about George into something unrecognizable. I couldn’t face him. He’d immediately see the awful truth—that I was still in love with Mr. Fantasy Man I’d known for a few weeks ten years ago, and all I wanted to do was make hot, passionate love with him and decorate his body with chocolate-based paints.

Fortunately, routine was so ingrained for us now that George didn’t even notice anything amiss. He came home in time for dinner, for once. Lucy was over the moon at having dinner with her daddy, and he kept his attention focused on her. And I’d ended up making an effort on the meal—I’d tossed the linguine with shrimp and lemon, an uncharacteristic departure from my usual “if it takes more than five minutes to prepare, it isn’t worth it” attitude. Mealtime was so hectic, George and I weren’t even able to speak, doing triage instead while shoveling food in our mouths as fast as possible. Lucy was pretty much draped head to foot in plastic—bib, chair cover, floor cover—in a futile attempt to stop food from migrating from her plate throughout the house. There was an incident with a spilled cup of milk, and a lot of crying about strawberries instead of grapes for dessert—“Mommy, strawberries was my favorite last week. So I’m not eating strawberries anymore. I don’t want them! Get them off my plate! I want grapes now!”

So, our only chance to talk didn’t happen until Lucy was asleep, after eight p.m. George took over the bulk of the bedtime routine—bath, story, hugs and kisses. I only had to make an appearance at the end, to give Lucy a last kiss. “Daddy, hold my hand till I fall asleep,” she murmured sleepily, and he did. He was such a good dad. He’d do anything for Lucy, as he would for me.

How could I even think about Josh when here was my my future, right in front of me? My difficult, beautiful Lucy, and my steady, unwavering husband. “Tough day?” he asked sympathetically, emerging from Lucy’s room, exhausted himself after a full day of teaching, traffic, and three-year-old. He peered with concern at my drooping eyes, red-rimmed from constant internal viewing of the Vivian-and-Josh porno. “Not so bad,” I had to answer. And that was the extent of the evening’s conversation. I excused myself to bed, incredibly early, to continue my fantasizing in private. Imagining Josh, I couldn’t think about George. How could I not see Josh? And how could I see him, realizing I still loved him, and betray George so despicably and thoroughly?

~ ~ ~

I’d felt ill all the time since Sunday—my stomach aching and head pounding—but also intensely alert, deliriously happy for no reason. Since reading that Book Review section, a constant song was running through my head. It went, “Josh is back! Josh is back!” all the time, and in I Love Lucy style, I’d find myself whirling thrilled through the kitchen, singing at the top of my lungs as I cleaned the bathroom.

Eating seemed unnecessary. I was subsisting on handfuls of Rice Chex and chocolate chip cookies. I was on a huge high, Josh’s face in 3-D, all the time, in the front of my brain. I couldn’t sleep now that Josh was coming. And I couldn’t sleep, thinking about Josh constantly, when George was right there next to me. The only person who’d ever believed enough in me to give me everything—a nice middle-class life, a child, love, security. I was the worst. I was an awful, heartless person. How cruel to George, to even think about Josh, much less plan to see him.

Worst of all, George was beginning to annoy me. Little things, like swishing his mouthwash around for exactly sixty seconds. The way he spent a whole half hour every evening shining his shoes while talking to Madame on the phone. Okay, maybe these weren’t little things. Everything George did, besides paying all our expenses, was bugging me. But I couldn’t say a word.

Early Tuesday morning, I watched impatiently as George watered his orchids. He did so twice a week in the warmer months so that they’d dry out by nighttime. He puttered around, moving a few orchids so that they’d have better access to light, and snipped off faded blooms with his little red pruners, dropping them with a rustling sound into a leftover Trader Joe’s bag. Then he went to the kitchen to prepare Tuesday waffles. We’d gotten a Belgian waffle maker as a wedding gift, and George’s whole face lit up when he opened that present. “I’m going to use this all the time!” he exclaimed, and it wasn’t just hyperbole—he did, every Tuesday. Separated the eggs, whipped the egg whites, folded it all together, and made waffles. All at 6:30 in the morning. Lucy woke up, crying as usual, smelled the waffles cooking, stopped, and waddled into the kitchen, her nighttime diaper soaked—she was potty trained during the day, but not at night. “Waffles!” she squealed delightedly, as she did every week, always a glorious surprise. I didn’t care—I wasn’t hungry in the least. When would George leave already?

But no: first we had to go through the waffle ritual. George always had only one waffle, and he poured syrup ever so carefully on that waffle, tilting it so that every hole had a little syrup in it. When the amount of syrup was about equal, he cut up the waffle in eight square-ish pieces, and ate each slowly, all the while helping Lucy with her waffle, which she would rip to shreds, and then dunk each shred in as much syrup as possible before devouring it using her fingers, the waffle simply a syrup-transport vehicle. Lucy maxed out at one waffle as well, which left me to eat the other half-dozen. Tuesdays, I spent the day eating waffles: for snacks, for lunch, and sometimes, for dinner. If I never saw another Belgian waffle again I would be eternally thankful. But throwing away the waffles felt disloyal to George. Tuesday waffles were his expression of love. He made them to make us happy.

Finally, George showered, grabbed his briefcase, and drove off. I pulled out in the Volvo with Lucy. It was only a mile to the preschool from our apartment, straight down Curson, right on Pico, a few blocks west of Fairfax. Instead of walking Lucy to her classroom as I usually did, I dropped her off in the car line, giving her a hasty hug goodbye and barely making eye contact with Ms. Bridget, who shepherded her into the building. I noticed that one end of the Happy Hands Preschool sign had come unmoored; it flapped crazily in the breeze. I drove home so quickly I broke whatever neighborhood speed limits there were, sailing over the speed bumps on Curson so fast I probably wrecked the car’s undercarriage.

And at last, for the morning at least, universes needn’t collide. It was just me and the computer. Sleazy or not, I was ready to do some serious digging. This time, searching on “Joshua Barnes” yielded a cornucopia of hits. His book page on Amazon. Scholastic’s promotional page for his book. And, bonanza, his personal web site. Unhesitating, I clicked straight to it. Clearly professionally done—a pastiche of superhero-ish colors—reds and golds—lots of Flash animation, ka-pows ricocheting off the screen at me. Clicking on About, I saw an attractive photograph, different from his book-flap photo—sweet, now I had two photos to commit to memory. In this one, he was relaxing in an adobe-walled studio, fingers poised over the keyboard of a Mac, gazing with a crooked smile at the camera. His hair was long now, curling almost to his shoulders, and his face looked boyish and satisfied.

I read with a sinking heart what I should have noticed on his book flap copy: “Joshua Barnes lives in Santa Fe with his wife and daughter.”

Well, there you go. It was one thing to spend several days fantasizing about getting back together with an old love; quite another to realize that my half-baked plans involved not only me, but also Josh, cheating on our respective spouses and children. I had no moral fiber, to even imagine such a scenario.

I clicked through links—blog postings. A bulletin board. None of them registered. Of course he’d be married. Of course he would have moved on.

I closed my browser window with a decisive click. That was that. I was so shook up, I badly wanted a drink, but it was 10 am. I still had some standards. So I rooted around my sweater drawer, another choice hiding spot, under thick green and beige sweaters until I came upon the crinkly little rectangle. My emergency stash of cigarettes. I rarely smoked anymore, but there were some times when sanity was more important than health. I went out the front door onto the narrow walkway outside the apartment and leaned forward cross-legged against the balustrade. I looked up at the chateau-like spires of the building’s roof. Castle, my ass. Holding on to the chipped white-painted metal railings with one hand while grasping the cigarette with another, I felt as if I were peering through the bars of some tenuous prison.

Mr. Abramoff came up the walkway, brushing fallen jacaranda petals from his jacket. He was a Hasidic Jew, and was usually attired in a black hat, black suit, and spotless white shirt. He was probably my age, but I persisted in calling him by his last name, because he seemed so much more wise and aware than I was. He appeared to have it all figured out. I envied him his complacency and the slow, deliberate way in which he spoke, with a kind of rocking, singsong cadence. I’d heard he was once a secular Jew, and had become born-again in whatever sense it takes to become a Hasid. Here was someone who had considered all the options, and decided on this one path. From there, all his decisions henceforth were made and prescribed. All he had to do was follow them, like a to-do list.

“Hi, Mr. Abramoff,” I waved, trying not to blow smoke in his direction.

“Hi, Mrs. Anglin,” he waved back amiably, his pudgy fingers backlit by the sun like starfish.

“Nice day, huh,” I offered. I always had a hard time figuring out what to say to him—our lives were so utterly dissimilar it was like chatting with someone who lived on the moon.

“Sure,” he replied, reaching into his shirt pocket, removing a packet of cigarettes, and touching it to his forehead and then toward me in a small salute of solidarity.

I grinned, surprised, and blew a ragged smoke ring his way.

~ ~ ~

I had drawn a series of cartoon-like panels at the end of that long-ago August—a visual history of our month together. I had folded the pages in half and put them in the outside pocket of my duffel; they’d eventually migrated to the bottom of a cardboard box in the garage, beneath strata of old birthday cards, yearbooks, and Hollywood Bowl programs. Looking at the smiling cartoon Vivian and Josh was too painful, like poking a fresh wound. I’d figured I’d take out that history one day, maybe when I was really old, in a retirement home or something, and all by myself. But that morning, after spending an hour staring dumbly into space on the walkway, inhaling my way through half a packet of cigarettes, my body fairly thrummed with nicotine.

Head aching, dizzy, buzzed, I hurried to our garage in back of the apartment building, yanked back the obstinate bolt, and battling rat droppings and spider webs, made it to the bottom of that buckled box. Clutching my prize, along with a battered box of doll heads and a crumpled paper bag containing three hacky sacks, I hurried back up the apartment, peering furtively around as if being spied on by the adultery police. Paging through those silly pictures, he came back to me full force, all those dusty long ago memories suddenly reclaimed. They reminded me that I’d been loved, unequivocally and completely. That I’d been young once, and free.

Maybe I was going a little batty. Just a little, maybe. Living on only a few hours of sleep a night, thinking constantly about Josh—someone I’d known only for less than a month, ten years ago.

Josh didn’t even remember me, probably. But I was giving up on “just friends.” Impossibly, that prehistoric part of the brain—the limbic system—never forgets love. Those passionate memories had been concealed for years, but Josh’s return made all those feelings dance right back, as if they’d never left. Even though I was in love with a ghost from my past.

No matter what, I was going to make Josh love me again. I didn’t know how, but somehow I’d show him that I was better than his wife, that he still needed me. I was already figuring out how Lucy and I would live in Santa Fe with him. How long we’d wait to get married. How to break the news to George. Maybe his wife would live down the street, so he could see his daughter as often as he wanted. Whatever. He would love me, again. He had to. I couldn’t be the only one feeling this desperate yearning; it wasn’t fair. If I hadn’t stopped loving him—he couldn’t stop loving me. That was that.

I wasn’t going nuts, really I wasn’t. This was the truth, as I could imagine it.

I fingered the doll heads in the old box curiously. I faintly recalled doing a series of disembodied doll head paintings in college. I took some toothpicks from the kitchen drawer and stuck them in the soft plastic at the bottom, propping the heads up on little toothpick tripods.

I wandered through the house, casually placing doll heads here and there—among the orchids in the living room, on Lucy’s nightstand, and lined haphazardly on top of our dresser.

There wasn’t much in the house that belonged to me. I’d brought a paper towel holder, my small collection of vintage cookbooks, and a couple oil paintings with me when I’d moved in with George. He had everything I’d need, anyway.

So it was nice, seeing those doll heads scattered about, pouty pink lips smiling in little pursed bows.

~ ~ ~

Lucy had some internal mechanism that woke her every few nights exactly at 1:30 in the morning—just when I was in my deepest sleep. That night I dimly heard her voice piping down the hall, increasingly frantic—“Mommy! Mommy! Mommeeeee!” But I could barely move—it was a huge struggle to push myself up and out from layers upon layers of heavy dreams, and emerge gasping into the velvety night. Tightening my bathrobe around me, I stumbled down the hall to her room.

“What happened, honey?”

“I had a bad dream, and it woked me up.”

“Everything’s fine, you’ll be fine.” I stroked her soft hair. “Just go back to sleep.”

“I want some milk.”

I was too tired to argue, and lurched to the kitchen to pour milk into a sippy cup, a fair amount spilling on the counter.

She drank the milk, slowly, making it last. “Stay with me, Mommy.”

It was pointless to say no—I’d fought that late-night battle before and lost. Mrs. Schusterman had heard the hysterical result, and had run upstairs to bang at our door in the early morning hours, her gray hair wild around her head, her eyes small frustrated slits.

“Sure, sweetie.”

I curled my body around hers in the narrow, twin-sized bed. She was warm and pliant, and after a while, I felt her relax into sleep, her soft breaths deepening, slowing. It was utterly peaceful, lying there with my arm around her, feeling her slight shoulders rise and fall. When I was certain she was asleep, I raised myself on my elbow to look at her. In sleep she looked so much like she had as a baby—the round, fuzzy curve of her cheek, her small snub nose. Her blonde hair, late to grow in, had never been cut, and curled around her face in a soft nimbus of fine baby curls. I thought I’d never seen anything so amazing in my life. I made that, I thought. How can it be—that I made something so perfect? Everything was all right while I lay next to Lucy.

But back in my own bed, still awake hours later, my mind revolved helplessly between George-Josh-Josh-George. I could picture Josh writing, maybe, in that little studio, with photos of his family on the desk and a view of yesterday’s cloudy, 61-degree sky out his window. His wife was undoubtedly intelligent and accomplished, his child far better behaved than my own. Maybe on weekends, he’d be outdoors at a farmer’s market with his perfect little family, buying chile peppers or whatever a person did in Santa Fe. Tonight he’d be asleep too, with his beautiful wife in his beautiful house. He’d have kissed her goodnight as I kissed George.

During the day, I’d go through the motions of daily life—cooking dinner, greeting George in the evening as he came through the door. If Lucy was awake, George would hug her first. Then I’d step in, put my hands on his shoulders and kiss him—one second, two, our lips moist, pull away. It was entirely un-sexual, like kissing my brother. But that was what happened after you’d been married for a while, as predictable as the moon. Since I'd found out about Josh, it felt like pretending. I was utterly divided, half of me going through the motions of conversing with George, disciplining Lucy, washing the dinner dishes. The other half in fevered Josh-and-Vivian movie mode, all the time. In my fantasies, after wild sex, we’d cuddle in bed with our respective pads of paper. I would draw, he would write. Art porn: that’s what my fantasies boiled down to.

I had thought it would be like this forever. Me, home with Lucy, the years going by, one slipping into another. Nothing changing. Me and George, sitting near each other every night on the sofa, but rarely close enough to touch. Fridays, making love almost like strangers, hurrying to finish so we could go to sleep, only to wake up at six o’clock the next morning and start the routine again. Forever in this apartment, too great a bargain to ever leave, in the perfect Los Angeles location, only a mile from Madame’s.

I had always been loyal to George—it had never occurred to me not to be. Once I made a friend, I kept that friend forever—I still called Kim once a month, for heaven’s sake. The same was true for a marriage: once you committed to something, you stuck it out. It was also true that George and I weren’t joiners. We didn’t go on dinner dates with other couples. We were members of no clubs, except for George’s precious Orchid Society. I spent most of my waking hours in the company of Lucy. So: there was never any opportunity, any need, to search outside that box I lived in, until now. You could talk morals all you wanted—it was what you did when presented with the opportunity to be unfaithful that really defined you as a person.

I had to do the right thing. I wanted to see Josh, true. I would go to his book signing, and say hello. And see if he wanted to be friends. That’s it—just friends. After all these years, of course we could be friends—it had been so long, after all. And we’d known each other for so short a time. I could love George, and I could see Josh. Crazy fantasies were all well and good, but nothing was actually going to happen.