“What? You never told me that.” Her heart feels as if it’s been pumped with helium. “Jonathan, what are you talking about?”
“I texted you earlier today. Alice, you’ve got to stop calling me. Marissa knows. She figured everything out. She’s threatening to leave me and take my kids.”
“Oh, God. Um. Okay.” She fumbles. “That’s awful, but, uh, I mean, weren’t you saying things weren’t going well, anyway?”
“Married people have problems, Alice. That’s just called life. I’d be fucking crazy to ever leave Marissa, but now she might leave me.”
“But, Jonathan, when we were getting tacos, you said—”
“Look, forget what I fucking said, all right?” he hisses. “God, I can’t believe this is happening.”
Alice stands up and begins pacing in the stall. “That’s impossible, though.”
“It’s not.” He sounds pissed. She imagines him standing in his office overlooking Wilshire, his arms raised about his head as he shouts at her, the glass door blocking out the noise. “It’s not impossible, because you insisted on posting your every goddamned move on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and God only knows where else.”
An owl perches itself on the house’s chimney, and, somewhere in the ink-black field, a dog barks.
“And guess what,” Jonathan continues. “Marissa’s not some fucking idiot. All she had to do was see your thirty missed calls on my phone, check out your Facebook page, and then look at our credit card statement. And now—fuck, Alice, do you know what you’ve done? Do you know how much you’ve fucked me over?”
“Wait a second,” she says. “I fucked you over? What, I tied you down and insisted that you screw me? I demanded that you have an affair? I’d like to remind you that you were the one who followed me into the supply closet and—”
“You knew damned well what you were doing.”
Should she be sorry? Should she be feeling empathy for him, right now? She wonders if she could, even if she wanted to; she wonders if she’s lost the capacity to empathize.
“It’s not my fault you married Nancy Fucking Drew,” she says.
“Fuck you, Alice.”
“I had a miscarriage.”
“What?” His voice lightens, hovering somewhere between shock and panic. I’m despicable, Alice thinks. “When?”
“Five years ago.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
She starts crying.
“I’m sorry, Alice, I really am, but that’s got nothing to do with me.”
“Do you know where I am right now?”
“I’ve got a meeting in two minutes. I’ve got—”
“I’m sitting in a cow stall in England, Jonathan. A cow stall that’s probably never been used, but was built to make rich people believe that they’re staying in a farm that people actually used to use. I’m sitting here in a fucking gown that my sister bought for me. A gown that all of the other bridesmaids are wearing. These awful women whose one goal in life seems to be making me feel like shit. My sister hardly spoke to me tonight, and my mother—literally the person I’ve been trying to prop up for the past three years—was more interested in flirting with her ex-husband, this guy who absolutely fucked her over, than in spending time with me.” She’s sobbing now. “About a hundred yards away a group of preteens from the fucking Boys’ Brigade just watched me walk barefoot down a gravel hill after saying their nightly prayers. And—”
“I’ve got to go, Alice.”
“Wait.”
He doesn’t, though; he just hangs up, and Alice throws her phone against the stall’s wall. It doesn’t break—it bounces off and falls back to her feet, its screen now bearing a small, hairline crack. The distant dog starts barking again. The owl on top of the chimney cranes its neck around, and takes flight. Alice watches it beat its wings against the night, then vanish somewhere in the tangled branches of a tree.
“Goddamn it,” she says, picking up her phone. “Goddamn it.”
She runs a finger over the crack, and as she’s doing so she hears shoes crunching against the house’s gravel drive. Standing up, she sees her brother’s silhouette, lit dimly by the porch light.
“Heyo,” he says, spotting her, and she wonders how much he’s heard.
“Hi.”
“What’re you doing over there?” He wobbles a bit before finding his balance.
“Nothing,” she says. “Just listening to the sheep.”
“Bet that’s the first time in your life you’ve ever said that.” Paul grins.
“How long have you been standing there?” she asks him.
“About two point five seconds.” He sneezes. “You see all those boys up there? In their little tents?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Just acting like a bunch of boys.” She wipes the wetness from underneath each eye. “Why aren’t you still at the party?”
“I couldn’t be there anymore,” he says, scratching his cheek. “It was making me too depressed. All those people in love. I hate those people.”
“Yeah, well.”
Paul rubs his eyes and cranes his neck from side to side. He’s untucked his shirt, and now the tails of it hang loose and wrinkled at his side. It’s too big for him, Alice thinks. It looks like it belongs to a set of pajamas.
“Mind if I join you?” he asks.
She looks on either side of her. “There’s only one bucket.”
It doesn’t matter, though; he steps into the stall and sits, cross-legged, on the floor.
“What happened to your jacket?”
“Left it there, I guess,” he says. “Were you crying or something? You look like someone slugged you in the fucking face.”
How much should she tell him? she wonders. On one hand, she wants to lay herself bare and confess to her epic decline—a fall that could be described as Icarian, had she ever actually been close to the sun. She wants to confess to Paul how, two weeks ago at Claridge’s, she snorted enough Klonopin to seduce a woolly mammoth before gorging herself on a thousand pounds’ worth of room service. She wants to say how, two minutes ago, Jonathan slapped her with a scarlet letter before telling her to fuck off for good. But then, on the other hand, she doesn’t think she can stand another ounce of familial judgment, not from Eloise, or her mother, or, most of all, from Paul. She imagines what words of wisdom he might have for her: that she made her own adulterous bed and now she’s got to sleep in it; that, as a victim of a recent breakup, he can only imagine what the wife is going through; that this is the problem with heterosexuals—they extol the importance of marriage, only to go and do shit like this.
So all she says is: “It’s over with Jonathan.”
“Is that why you broke your phone?”
She looks down; she hadn’t realized she was still holding it, the crack catching fragments of the porch light.
“Yes,” she says. “I guess. Or, I don’t know. It was one of the reasons.”
He lays his head in her lap, and at first she doesn’t know what to do. She straightens her back and watches as he closes his eyes. She stays still for a moment, listening to the sheep baa, and finally relaxes. She reaches down and brushes his hair, damp with sweat and humidity, from his eyes.
“He sort of sounded like a douche, anyway,” Paul says with his eyes still closed.