We were both so miserable, waiting for me to shut up. I wasn’t about to leave Robin for this woman, although I liked her, she was entertaining, but the financial imbalance made it a nonstarter. What was I supposed to do, follow her around, begging, for the rest of my life?
“When I met you, I didn’t know you were loaded. And when I found out, it made it harder to like you, not easier.”
She was glad to hear this. But then she was sad, because it was true.
A week after that awkward scene in Connecticut, Amy’s seven-year-old daughter had a brain hemorrhage while walking off a soccer field. Somehow in Amy’s mind there was this linkage of events, which on one level I understood. Overwhelmed with guilt, she took it as a sign. I gave her whatever space she needed.
I spent the spring and summer forgetting her. Although at times when I couldn’t forget her, I pictured her at Lily’s bedside, or in the woods behind her house, walking the dog, missing me, maybe weeping in the pickup line in her beautiful-smelling German car or on an airport runway on Anguilla, killing whatever thoughts came up.
But cutting off daily contact with her had another effect. Like the quiet that rushes in after a car alarm, it let me breathe, gave me peace, made me strong. In the intervening silence I began to notice you-know-who. I’d been living in my head for so long, Robin had become strange to me again. You recognize the strangeness as the person you first met.
She put mustard on her hamburgers. She licked her yogurt bowl at breakfast. She stuck her sweaters in the freezer to kill the moths. As winter edged into spring, she had her moles burned off, and over time I saw those burn marks slowly heal. I watched from my side of the bed as she drugged herself into a coma every night, spying on her from under the blankets, noting the fine white hairs on her neck, and little moons that hung outside her undies. In the warming days of spring, her easy-browning, pollen-dusted skin faintly shimmered. I listened to her voice, wafting across the hall as she woke Kaya for preschool, heard it in my sleep, reminding me of my mother. I watched the fingertip she traced along Beanie’s ear while he lolled on her nipple.
Her own mother, once the means of her survival, was all but gone. Her sister out west never called. Her brother was long gone, but sometimes haunted her dreams.
Her father was a tall, broad, large-lipped man who, in a lab at a chemical company in the seventies, had accidentally invented a nylon fiber five times stronger than steel. He’d won every important award in chemistry but the Nobel and was loved the world over by people whose lives he’d saved, his invention having protected them from bullets or bombs, lauded by builders of sports equipment, suspension bridges, musical instruments, and medical devices. And yet he was the one who’d left the family all those years ago, for his sexy lab assistant, and could not be forgiven. After the tragic death of his son, he still didn’t return, and he eventually married that Turkish hussy half his age. It was complicated stuff. He was sporadically, effusively generous. I wished he’d give us more. He claimed he didn’t have a lot of money—his discoveries belonged to DuPont—but he had a lot more money than we did.
We visited them in May, shocked by the cloudless Midwestern beauty of Chicago in late spring. We wandered through the unused rooms of their big brick townhouse, hunted for a wooden spoon in the kitchen they never cooked in, and tried to work the remote of their home theater while they went to the lab or wined and dined their favorite molecular engineers and polymer scientists. They’d always just returned from meetings all over the world and told fun stories of parties in restaurants, famous acquaintances, and the latest in composite materials. After a couple of days of that, I found Robin alone in some unused room, behind a cloud of agitated motion, knees shaking, breasts pumping, starry-eyed, hunched, vengeful, cursing the wife, eating meat off a chicken leg. The wife insisted that our kids call her Jenny, rather than Grandma or her real name, Mujgan. Mujgan sent us home with toys, and Dopp kits she’d collected from Lufthansa’s first-class cabin, and beautifully wrapped clothing she’d already worn with no tags and no receipt, which Robin draped against herself and thanked her for, then brought home and tried on, full of sarcasm, then gave to Goodwill.
They also owned a vacation house we’d been to once or twice, off the coast of Florida, on an island made of garbage.
It was hard to believe they had ever been a family. But there they were, in framed photos in her dad’s study, with Mom too, squinting under sun hats when the kids were small. And there they were a few years later, during a trip to France, on a research fellowship, after her brother was killed, in an image mostly devoid of grief, with Mom out of the picture, showing instead the snazzy purse her dad wore in Europe, and Mujgan in a macramé bikini, and Robin’s familiar scowl, and her sister’s nearly fatal eating disorder.
In old photos, her brother, Eddie, had been the smiling one. If people tried talking to her about him, even now, it made her angry. Picture something so terrible that for the rest of your life it never changes and you never figure out how to deal with it. I was sad for her at Christmas and at times when without warning his absence became vivid, sad for the past she’d put on ice, for their family’s truncated future, sad for who I’d hoped to be to make up for it, the brotherly husband I should’ve become, for how I’d fallen short. The person she’d married was part of a future I couldn’t live up to.
It’s hard to approximate the sweep and fullness of a twelve-year relationship while diminishing and giving evidence against my wife and children in order to validate my adulterous behavior, but on that trip to visit her dad in Chicago this past spring, I felt especially tired of my marital shortcomings and stints of poverty and artistic despair, the failure to meet my own low expectations. I was suddenly aware of the time I’d wasted all winter, trying to lie and sext myself past manic domestic entanglement.
It was just the usual stuff, sooty socks, closet shelves falling apart, the increasing awkwardness of disrobing in front of my wife, the sounds of rodents carrying stray cornflakes behind the stove and up into our walls, along with any lingering nerve damage she’d suffered from pregnancy that radiated from her hip, up into her lower back, down the meridian of her leg, rode her wiring and made her sour and frail. I gave up on screwing, didn’t wonder what my chances were, didn’t look for an opening, didn’t engineer it, didn’t beat myself up over an opportunity I might’ve missed. Lying there as another chilly night passed between us, I was relieved to feel trapped and defeated, to feed it and point it inward and hoard it for myself.