They order breakfast to the room after and talk about their only child. The child she had not missed until she saw her husband standing in the hallway outside her hotel room door. They watch videos of this child while they are naked, feet rubbing. The first splash in the shallow end of their condo-building pool, the sour face of applesauce on the tongue for the first time. Things that matter more than any parent thinks they will.
Her eyes follow him across the room, and now that they aren’t touching, she gives herself a handful of seconds to feel the terror. If the flight hadn’t been a red-eye. If he’d landed last night instead. He calls for someone to collect the dining cart. He flips through the tray of hotel magazines on the desk where the phone sits.
“What is this?”
There is a note. On those pads of paper hotels always have.
Nobody has ever left a note. She hadn’t thought to check. “Show me?”
She does her best to sound surprised. Amused, even. She sits up, steadies herself as the structure of her body disintegrates. She seems to float above them both. To watch from another place.
He doesn’t look at her. He rips the paper from the small rectangular pad and sails it in her direction. The paper lands at the lump of her feet under the covers.
Her name isn’t written. It could be a note left for anyone.
You were fucking amazing.
Can we stay in touch?
His phone number, his name.
“Looks like the last guest had some fun,” she snickers. “Fuck, though. That could get a person in trouble. I mean, honestly! You’d almost think the maid left it there on purpose for a laugh.”
“Maybe.” He picks up a magazine about the hotel chain, but then puts it right down.
He must be thinking about the possibility. He shakes out his jeans from the floor, pulls the belt from the loops. He is quiet. He doesn’t unpack. He usually likes to unpack.
She can feel how close they are to implosion. She must speak.
“I have the afternoon free, only an eleven a.m. and then a lunch meeting.”
“Good.”
“We could walk, get a drink on a patio somewhere and Parisian people watch.”
“Sure.”
He checks his phone. The doorbell rings to collect the dining cart. She runs herself a shower, where she bends over, puts her elbows on her knees.
The note is on the bedside table next to her phone when she comes out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel.
It occurs to her only then that her husband could call the number.
She needs to get rid of it, fast.
But then she understands something. Jacob has put the note there for a reason. Convince me that I’m wrong, the piece of paper says to her.
She sits on the bed beside him. He is reading something on his phone, one arm behind his head.
“Why did you put this note here?” she asks. “It’s creeping me out. Makes me think some prostitute was in here before we checked in.”
She makes a face, pops up, feigns lightness. She crumples it, throws it into the trash can under the desk. There is only one way forward, and there has only ever been. She opens the door of the wardrobe and sighs.
“Short sleeves? What’s the weather supposed to be today, do you know?”
He looks up, but he does not answer her.
45
Whitney
The Hospital
The nurse is asking her if she’d like to help.
She feels a wet towelette against her fingertips, and then her hand is placed in a basin of warm water. There is a bar of Ivory soap. She should know what to do next. She is his mother.
But she is elsewhere.
His fingers, inside her. She can feel them, the way he strokes her, and she can’t pull her mind away from this, not even as she’s watching the nurse carefully peel the hospital gown down her son’s body.
His hot breath in her ear. She tells him exactly what to say, and he says it. She is trying not to feel now the way she does when this happens. The nurse is telling her to make suds on the cloth with the soap.
She has bought Jacob plane tickets to art fairs, to exhibitions, to places where he’d need to be for several days at a time. She has made it seem like a favor she’d done for him. He has wrapped himself around her and told her she’s the best wife in the world. That he appreciates her. He holds her longer than usual before he leaves for the airport.
The nurse is lifting her son’s arm and gesturing for her to come closer. She squeezes the water from the cloth.
She always cleans up when they are done with a box of tissues she keeps in the shed, tissues they use to wipe the children’s noses. She doesn’t always get it all, and she knows there is sometimes still cum on the shed floor, on the edge of the shelf, and in the mornings, Louisa and the children go in to get their trucks, their skipping ropes, the attachment for the sprinkler.
The nurse is holding her hand now, she is showing her what to do, how to wipe away the smell from under his arm, three gentle motions.
She thinks of him while Jacob makes her orgasm in their bed, while Jacob is saying her name, telling her how beautiful she is. That he loves her. And she loves him, too, she loves him so much that what she’s done to them all might kill her.
Her hand is in the warm water again, and the nurse is lifting the gown up from his waist now, she is telling her to make more suds.
The sting is back in her throat. She could throw up in the basin. She can’t turn around to see her son’s face again, and so she hands the nurse the soaking wet cloth and hears the water drip on the floor. The nurse is telling her it’s okay, but it isn’t.
There were others, long before this one, shortly after Xavier was born. Other fingers inside her, other whispers in her ear. Singular events that she can expertly forget, like the features on their faces, and the color schemes of their luxury hotel rooms. Blank, all of it. She’d never given her last name, not because she feared they’d look her up again, but because her last name was Jacob’s last name, and she could never have brought herself to say it.
It has never been about Jacob, not even then.
It’s about the way she needs to feel outside of him, apart from them all. From the responsibilities, the expectations she’s mounted on her own shoulders for decades. From the three children she is no good at raising. The ones she will always fail, no matter how much money there is or how hard she tries.
All of this feels survivable, even palatable, when she exercises this one little freedom.
Of course, it is not a freedom at all.
The nurse is talking to her, she is speaking about the miraculous resilience of children, of their defiant young bodies. Of the hope she must hold on to as a mother. His eyes fluttered as she’d lain with him, they might flutter again if he senses her presence, calm and loving. They might even open, she says. Whitney wants to stuff the cloth in her mouth, she wants to be alone with her son without the sound of another voice. But the nurse’s hand is on her shoulder now.
Nothing about it has been reckless, like an affair is said to be. She’s never reckless. What she’s done these past nine months has been calculated. There is risk and there is benefit, and there are good people she lies to, and good families she is threatening, and there is shame in this. So much shame. And yet it has always, every time, felt worth it.
But then she began to feel hungrier and hungrier. And the desire to be aroused by him crept into her mind when it shouldn’t have. And then she felt anxious if a day went by without a glimpse of him, a reminder that she could have that feeling again, if she needed it. And was it about him, specifically? Or was it as simple as this: he is not the husband who is better than her, he is not her relentless obligation, and she does not fail him over and over. He is not melded to her like a heavy metal.
The pleasure became a habit. There was no control anymore, none at all.
She is banging her fist against her heart now. And she is replaying Wednesday night.
The nurse is saying she will get her a cup of water, that she needs to take care of herself. To be strong. That her family needs her. She is guiding her back to the chair at Xavier’s other side. But she doesn’t want the Styrofoam cup on her lips. She doesn’t want to feel strong. She felt strong before. She felt invincible, she has felt the reins in her hands for decades. And now she is done. She surrenders.
46
September
The Loverlys’ Backyard
Aiden and Blair are the only ones left at the party. The caterers are gone. The twins are in their beds. Blair helps Whitney clear the kitchen island, wrap the leftover food they’ve been picking at. They are unusually quiet with each other.
Chloe and Xavier come into the kitchen, and he unwraps the dessert platter, puts his fingers in the carefully arranged fruit, digs for a slice of pineapple. Chloe finds a place under Blair’s arm, puts her face into her mother’s chest.
“Please don’t touch the food, Xavier,” Whitney says.