“What I mean is I can’t see you anymore.”
“Oh.” They were both silent, and she considered the quality of the silence, debating whether to ask. “Is something wrong?”
“The truth is,” he said, “I’m too attracted to you.”
That was his reason! She was taken aback. She said she understood, but she didn’t. It wasn’t like this happened every day. She was an under-the-radar person, that was who she was, which was one of the reasons why Tommy had happened in her life like a helicopter landing in a field, why even now she couldn’t bring herself to relinquish his attention.
The next day she went to the client’s house at the agreed-upon time and found him home. He looked so purely astonished to see her that she was unnerved. “But I canceled,” he said.
She summoned her resolve. “I know,” she said.
He was eight years younger than she was and seemed younger still, she assumed because he had no children. He was a grant writer at a small science and technology company. Something to do with mechanical arms. He told her a story once about research on monkeys, monkeys controlling the arms directly from their brains. When she pictured this, she saw a row of monkeys concentrating hard on a row of robot arms, wearing on their temples those electrode things you always see on sci-fi television.
She didn’t ask him many questions about his job. Honestly, she wasn’t that interested. She wasn’t interested in his life before her, in his family grievances or his painful breakups or what was the weirdest sexual thing he’d ever done. She felt a painful embarrassment when he brought up these topics, as if she were thirteen and a parent had just made a dumb joke in public. She liked his body—he was tall and skinny, very different from Tommy, who was all lean slouchy muscles, even now. Sex with him was pleasant and effective. Afterward she was relaxed. It was as if they’d just gone on with their regular appointments, only now he was the therapist. When they couldn’t get together, she felt the sort of disappointed restlessness you endure when your babysitter cancels or a friend texts that she can’t meet you for lunch. She looked forward to seeing him with an anticipation of pleasure, but she never yearned. She never slipped into the backyard with her cell phone because she just had to hear his voice.
It went on like this for a while—six months or so. She and Tommy weren’t really having sex, because she refused when he was drunk and most nights he was drunk. For all she knew he was still getting it elsewhere. She more or less assumed he was. Why couldn’t she just leave him? She heard the question echo inside her head, but nobody ever replied. Zoe was thirteen, then fourteen, dating her first boyfriend, who was sixteen and already driving. Jennifer saw when she met him that he stood just like Tommy—that slouch, that lowered head, that watchfulness disguised as don’t-care cool. Of course. She could barely stand to say hello to him.
What happened was that the other man started to act like he loved her. Alluding to their future. Gazing at her moony eyed. Working up to the question of why she didn’t leave Tommy. “You fight with him a lot, don’t you?” “Your daughter’s not a kid anymore, right? Not really.” “You deserve better than that guy.” In retrospect she sees a connection between this behavior and her own. She grew careless. She didn’t always delete his texts, leaving her phone on the kitchen counter. She went to his house without even bothering to take the massage table. She carried condoms in her purse. She agreed to go out to lunch with him, right in her own neighborhood. One afternoon they went to the movies. There was no one in the theater but a couple people way up in the third row. “Let’s sit in the back and make out,” she said, and he, agreeable boy, was willing.
Even now she can hardly stand to think of it. She had her hand in his pants—in his pants—and her mouth was on his mouth, her eyes were closed and he was breathing hard, his breath catching in a way that told her he was close and she was wondering if she had any tissues in her purse, and she heard, “Mom?”
Zoe and her boyfriend had ditched school. “Well,” Zoe said, “I guess I’m not getting in trouble.” Later, when Tommy came home, not even six and already with a buzz on, and Zoe banged her bedroom door open and said, “Mom’s having an affair”—was Jennifer wrong to think that Zoe’s primary emotion was triumph?