“Farfalle,” she repeats. “That’s it! And then this chocolate lava cake for dessert. So yummy.”
She straddles him under her white skirt, blouse sliding off her shoulders. For a brief moment I inhabit his shuddery skin. Lying on my back on the Cassie-dented mattress, between her broad thighs. Feeling her opening my shirt button by button, my tie being tugged by her primped hands. When she leans in to kiss me, a coil of red hair grazes my cheek and her sleeves slide farther down her shoulders and I feel the full weight of Cassie. She tastes of flavored balm and lava cake and hot day. A tinfoil swan of leftover lava cake sits on the dresser, watching.
I open my eyes.
“Where did you go there?” she laughs.
“Nowhere. Sounds like a perfect day.”
“It was,” she says, beaming at the nothing just past my left ear. Unlike Eve, her beam creates no hollows.
? ? ?
“So what’s the occasion?” my husband says, looking worriedly at the waterfall, at the faux frescoes on the ceiling designed to emulate Tuscany.
“I just thought it would be nice to have dinner out together for once.” I try beaming.
He shrugs and cracks open the oversize menu. Then he closes it again.
“I’m surprised you picked this place,” he says, staring at the vast basket of oily breadsticks between us. They’re sprinkled with a yellow saltlike substance designed to resemble cheese.
“I thought it would be fun,” I say.
He raises an eyebrow, then shakes his head and opens the menu again.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“I’m going to have the farfalle,” I announce.
“Okay,” from behind his menu.
“And after I thought maybe we could get some cupcakes. At Sweet Diva, that new place that just opened? They supposedly do a great coconut cream.” I try beaming some more but he just looks at me.
“What?” I ask him.
“Nothing.” He looks back into the menu. “I just don’t want it to go dark is all.”
“Dark? I don’t know what you mean dark. It’s just dinner.”
He lowers the menu and sighs.
“You know how you are. I wish it could just be dinner too. But whenever we go out like this it’s never just dinner, it’s this downward spiral, this kamikaze of guilt.”
Tears fill my eyes, but I suck them back. I nod at the bread basket.
“I’m sorry. I’m being an ass.” He takes my hands, but the grip is lax. Noticing the nail polish, he says, “Nice.”
“I just got them done today.”
“Didn’t you just get your nails done, like, a few days ago?”
“Yeah.”
He lets go of my hands.
“What’s wrong?”
“I just want you to be happy is all.”
“I know. I am.”
“Good,” he says. “Me too.”
“You are?”
“Of course. Why?”
I think again about the night when I watched that video of the two fat maids on his desktop. Felt his office door opening behind me. Saw his worried reflection in the window above the screen. Heard him call my name like a question from the doorframe, call with impossible softness, a softness I hadn’t heard in so long, like his voice was fingers, stroking the face of my name. I didn’t answer or turn around, I just kept watching, my hands curled into fists.
“No reason,” I say now.
“You’ve been so distant since your mother died. Honestly, Elizabeth, I haven’t known how to handle it. I don’t know what to do.”
Liz, I think. I told you I go by Liz now. Why can he never get it right?
“This has nothing to do with my mother,” I lie. “At all. I’m fine.”
And I sit there, watching him chomp breadsticks and regard the waterfall sullenly, thinking how there was a time, not too long ago, when with my formerly swollen hands, I could have snapped him in two. A time when I was afraid to lean against him if we were watching TV on the couch because I worried the weight of me was too much. That if I rolled over at night, I’d accidentally crush him to death. It was a ridiculous fear—I was never that big—but it kept me up nights. That and my own hunger.