Like a House on Fire, page 21
It wasn’t the boys’ fault. Somewhere between the charred garlic and the pasta water that bubbled up over the pot and onto her stove in a starchy hiss, she’d left the room. Not physically; she was still standing in the kitchen, stirring sauce, taking periodic sips of the water she was making herself drink instead of wine. But in her mind she was back in Mexico, hiking down to the beach on Saturday afternoon in a bikini top and frayed jean shorts she hadn’t worn since college, with a woman who made her feel both like the girl she’d been at nineteen and someone else entirely; a version of herself she hadn’t yet been.
She sighed and forced herself back to the present, to the pasta on the stove, to her crying children, to the chaos of a regular Wednesday night; except it wasn’t regular, nothing was regular anymore. Five days ago, she’d shoved regular off a Mexican cliff.
“There’s no need to shout, Jude,” she heard herself say. “I’m right here.”
“But you’re not listening to me,” he whined as Nash picked up the bin of Legos and turned it upside down on the couch. Jude shrieked as Legos went everywhere, then immediately bodychecked his three-year-old brother, sending Nash flying onto the floor in a fit of fresh tears.
“Jude! Apologize to your brother.” She was on autopilot now.
“But those are mine!”
“No! They’re! Not!” Nash shrieked from the rug.
“You guys. Please. Dinner’s almost ready. If you can calm down and eat all your pasta, I’ll let you have ice cream for dessert.” She hated herself for the laziness of this. Her sons were being absolute assholes, and she was going to reward them for it.
“Do you promise?” Jude asked, eyeing her with suspiciously dry eyes for a child who had been wailing ten seconds before.
“I don’t have to promise. My yes is my yes.” It was something her mother always said, a reference to a passage in the Bible about not swearing oaths. Merit had never used it before with her own kids, and here she was, today of all days, invoking her trustworthiness with a straight face. A laugh—unhinged, maybe maniacal?—gurgled in her chest at the irony of this.
The bribe worked at least. Both boys immediately stopped crying and got in their seats for dinner. Merit was so relieved by the silence that she didn’t even react when she noticed that one of them had colored on the table with Sharpie. There was a twisted sort of poetry in it, she decided as she ran her finger over the slick, clumsy scrawl. If this nicked and water-stained dining table was indeed the metaphor for their family life she’d always thought it was, an ugly scribble in black permanent marker in the center of it seemed about right.
She dished up soggy pasta and store-bought sauce and poured glasses of milk. Jude and Nash devoured their portions. Jude informed her that the noodles were disgusting. Nash pronounced it the yummiest thing she’d ever cooked. Merit pushed penne around on her plate. She wasn’t hungry, hadn’t been hungry, since she got back from her trip.
She fought the distraction. She fought the impulse to withdraw. It was difficult; the memories of Jane were magnetic, and that hidden place in her mind was a compelling retreat. It took effort to remember these two small humans, her sons, shoving food in their faces, dropping noodles on the floor that she would later pick up—this was her real life. A life she would have to reconcile with the hidden place eventually. But not yet.
“I love you guys,” she said to them at one point. “So much.”
Merit reached out to ruffle Jude’s hair, a gesture she was sure he’d come to hate very soon. Would he also come to hate her? Would she deserve it if he did?
“Can we still have ice cream?” he asked suspiciously.
“Definitely,” Merit said, and stood to gather their plates.
* * *
IT WAS AN eternity to Friday night. And then, suddenly, it arrived, and Merit was scrambling to make the five-thirty ferry to Sausalito. It seemed impossible that it’d only been five days since she and Jane parted in baggage claim at SFO with a pally fist bump that was both perfect and awful. Merit had wanted Jane to take her face in her hands and kiss her the way they’d kissed in bed that morning. But of course she couldn’t, they couldn’t, so close to home.
Her stomach was in knots as she walked toward Jane’s blue Tesla, idling at the curb. It was unfair that Jane was able to watch her cross the sidewalk while she couldn’t see Jane at all through the tint. Merit had offered to take an Uber up to the house, but Jane wouldn’t hear of it. She’d insisted on meeting her at the terminal when her ferry got in. Merit couldn’t remember the last time Cory had picked her up at the airport, if he ever had.
Jane rolled down the driver’s side window and stuck her head out. “Hi, beautiful girl,” she called, pushing her sunglasses off her face.
“Hey,” Merit called back, and touched her hair self-consciously. She’d spent a good ten minutes in the bathroom at work trying to zhuzh it up, as if some extra volume in her tresses might turn her back into the dauntless woman she’d been on that ledge in Mexico instead of the antsy bundle of nerves she’d become. “It’s good to see you.”
(Were there any truer words than these?)
“Get your ass in here,” Jane said, and blew her a kiss before she rolled up the window.
Any worries Merit had about their new dynamic evaporated when she got inside the car. Mostly because she was unable to assess the vibe between them after they started kissing, which happened approximately four seconds after she shut the passenger door. When had they become people who kissed each other in a car like teenagers? As she took hold of Jane’s black T-shirt, pulling her in closer, it struck her that maybe the better question was how they’d navigated two years of friendship without doing exactly this.
(It did not occur to Merit to ask herself how she had never once in thirty-nine-and-a-half years considered the possibility that she might enjoy kissing a girl.)
“I told myself I wouldn’t do this until we got to the house,” Jane said at some point. Had it been five seconds or five minutes? Merit had no idea.
She smiled and kissed Jane again. “Oh yeah? How’s that working out for you?”
“Not so well, I’d say.”
“To be fair, it has been an eternity since we’ve seen each other.”
“At least.” Jane sat back in her seat and looked at her. “I was worried it’d feel different,” she said finally.
“Me, too.”
“It doesn’t, though.”
Merit shook her head.
Jane pulled her sunglasses back down on her face. “We’re in trouble, you know.”
Merit nodded. She was terrified. She was completely unafraid. “I know.”
fourteen
MERIT?”
She didn’t know how many times her husband had said her name. She suspected it was many.
She blinked and turned her head toward him, shading her face with her hand. She’d left her beach hat in their hotel room; she was probably getting too much sun.
“So? Do you want to come with us?”
Come with you where?
Although she’d been sitting two feet from Cory for the past several hours, sipping the too-sweet piña colada he’d ordered her and turning pages of the paperback she’d bought at the airport gift shop, she hadn’t heard a single word he’d said. Her mind was somewhere else. It was back in Jane’s bedroom, with Jane.
They’d seen each other three times in the three weeks before she left for Hawaii with Cory and the kids. Each time for dinner, on a Friday, at Jane’s house. That first night Jane had roasted a chicken, and they’d eaten the entire thing with their hands, pulling the crispy skin off the legs with their teeth, washing it down with buttery chardonnay, the whole time talking, really talking, about everything and nothing at all. It had felt so decadent. Merit had never felt so deliciously full.
They’d made love on Jane’s white linen sheets after that.
When Merit had finally looked at her phone, it was eleven-thirty. They’d been in bed for three and a half hours. It felt like a fraction of that.
“You could stay the night,” Jane had said when Merit reluctantly dragged herself out of bed at eleven forty-five and put on her bra.
“And tell Cory what? ‘Jane and I are fucking now, so, you know, I’m gonna sleep over.’ ” Merit fished around the sheets for her underwear.
The light had gone out from Jane’s eyes in that moment.
“What an awful thing to say,” she’d said quietly.
“What?” Merit knew exactly what.
“We aren’t ‘fucking,’ Merit.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?” Jane had squinted a little in the dark and Merit had felt like a child in detention. It wasn’t an entirely unwelcome feeling. She’d wished, suddenly, wildly, to be spanked.
“Don’t be mad at me,” she’d said, and then she’d crawled across the bed on her hands and knees in the same lacy bra and underwear she’d worn the night she got pregnant with the baby she lost and climbed on top of Jane. What is my life? she’d asked herself as she flicked her tongue inside Jane’s mouth, watching this beautiful woman’s back arch in pleasure as she pinned her wrists against the bed.
Their next two outings were a lot like that, except they weren’t outings because they never left Jane’s house. Should she call them innings? Jane’s belly button was an innie; there was a café au lait birthmark on the inside of her right thigh. Innings, innie, inside. Being with Jane was an experience of in-ness, Merit decided, the sensation of being in, of being let inside another person. It was literal. It was metaphoric. It was sexual and it wasn’t. It was everything she and Jane had ever been to each other. It was nothing she had ever experienced before.
And now there was an ocean between them.
As she watched Cory walk the boys down the beach from her lounge chair by the pool, where she sat in the frumpy black one-piece she’d bought the week before because she couldn’t go on a family vacation with the same bikini she’d started her affair in, Merit wondered what would become of her life.
They’d been in Oahu for three days. The first day and a half had been fun; the novelty of a new place, a nice hotel, four gigantic pools, a swim-up bar. But the novelty had worn off the second night when Cory had gotten in the shower with her at nine o’clock, already hard and buzzed from the two mai tais he’d had on their balcony while Merit put the boys to bed on the pullout couch. “I’ve been wanting to do this all day,” he’d said in her ear as he’d pushed into her from behind. It was the first time they’d had sex since she got back from Mexico, and gratefully, it was fast. Water from the shower ran down her forehead, hiding her tears. She didn’t want to cheat on her lover with her husband, but there weren’t gold stars for that.
The whole thing was a head trip; not just the affair, but the fact that she was on a family vacation less than a month after her weekend away with Jane. She felt as if she’d been slingshot into an alternate reality. In this universe, she blew up swim floaties and cut room service hamburgers into bite-size pieces and had perfunctory sex with her husband in the shower while their kids slept. In the other, she drank tequila and slept naked and made love to a woman who made her feel like she had electricity in her veins. Which one was the real Merit? But she knew that wasn’t the right question. It was her in both places. She was in all of it. She was right here.
She wouldn’t let herself pretend she wasn’t conflicted. She was, deeply, more now than she had been at first. She’d betrayed Cory—no, she was betraying Cory, present tense. She was aware of it every Friday when she got on the ferry. It took all of her effort not to sob every Sunday morning in church. But if her affair with Jane was a mistake—and surely it was, had to be, could an extramarital affair ever be anything other than that?—it was one she would make again and again. Every time she felt herself starting to spiral—which happened at least once a day now, though she hadn’t breathed a word of it to Jane, and was happening now as she sat on her lounge chair in the blazing sun, fighting coconut-syrup-and-infidelity-induced nausea—she reminded herself that the only alternative to doing what she was doing was never doing it at all. And there was nothing as unfathomable as that.
When Cory and the boys got back from the beach, Merit put her book in her bag and stood up. “How was it?” she asked brightly. She heard the falsity in it. She didn’t want to be the sort of person who had to pretend to be happy at a beautiful island resort with her well-meaning husband and two healthy kids. But in this moment there was no one else to be.
“It was awesome!” Jude said, grinning. He hadn’t had a haircut in ages. His dark hair was curling around the ears, the way hers had when she was a kid.
“Oh yeah?” She sat down on her heels so she was eye level with him. Nash came up beside them and flung his arms around her neck.
“We saw a turtle!” he squealed, his face lit up with delight. When had he stopped looking like a baby? She didn’t know. She’d spent the majority of his third birthday party in December texting with Jane about plane tickets for their trip.
Jude’s face darkened. “Nash! I said I was gonna tell her!”
“You can both tell me,” Merit said, sliding her free arm around Jude’s sun-warmed body. He was lanky and olive-skinned like his dad. He was a rule follower like Cory, too, and it frustrated him to no end that his younger brother didn’t give two shits about protocol, a trait Nash had clearly inherited from her.
“It was so big,” Nash said, and Jude shot him another dark look.
“It wasn’t that big,” Jude retorted, knocking his brother’s sand bucket out of his hand.
“My bucket!” Nash shrieked, and then dissolved into tears on the ground.
“I have an idea,” Merit said cheerfully, as though one of her offspring hadn’t just behaved like a bullying asshole and the other wasn’t thrashing on the pool deck like a wild beast. “Why don’t you guys take me to this waterslide you love so much?”
“Wait, really?” Jude asked. “You’ll go on it, too?”
“Sure,” Merit said easily, and stood up.
“Did you hear that, Dad? Mom’s going on the waterslide!”
“Why do you sound so surprised?” she asked Jude.
“Because you never do fun stuff.”
“That is so not true!”
“Whatever. Can we go now?” He was impatient like his father, too.
“For the record, I am very fun,” she told Jude. Just ask my friend Jane.
“Let’s go, Mommy,” came Nash’s voice beside her, the tears gone as fast at they’d come. He jumped up and down. “Let’s go, let’s go!”
She looked at Cory. “You coming?”
“You guys go ahead,” he said. “I’m gonna order some lunch.”
“But it’s so early,” she said. “Why don’t you wait until we get back, and we can all eat together?”
“Nah. No need. I’ll just grab something now.” Cory signaled for the waiter.
“You can’t wait?”
Cory looked at her. “Mer, I’m just going to order something from the pool menu, which you can do just as easily when you get back. Why does it matter if we all eat at the same time?”
“It doesn’t,” she said, and, taking the boys by their hands, left.
As they made their way to the main pool, it occurred to Merit that Jane would never order lunch without her, and maybe that was the thing she’d fallen in love with first. From the very beginning of their relationship, when they were still basically strangers and Jane invited her to a pitch she didn’t need her for, and brought her a latte the next morning, and took her out for oysters and champagne that afternoon, Jane had made it clear that she wanted Merit around. The Monday-morning gossip sessions, the afternoon coffee breaks, their Friday lunches out—all the little rituals that followed, none of them necessary or efficient or remotely productive, each one instigated by Jane. Her affection for Merit was immediate and unequivocal, and it was the antidote to the loneliness Merit had felt for so long she’d stopped identifying it as loneliness. It wasn’t simple, but it wasn’t that complicated either. Jane had shown up for her. Before the attraction, before the overwhelming desire that clouded everything else. Merit had stopped feeling alone in her boat.
That didn’t explain their chemistry, the undeniable magnetism, the sensation of waking up from a deep sleep to an amplified sort of consciousness that felt like the very definition of being alive. But the experience that came before all that, the experience of togetherness, was the thing that made Merit feel safe enough to eventually acknowledge the rest of it. More than Jane’s beauty (god, she was beautiful), or her talent, or her brilliant mind and the way it tackled problems like a bird devouring a fish, Merit had fallen in love with the thing that happened when they were simply with each other, when she and Jane became MeritandJane. It was miraculous, really. She’d found togetherness with someone she wanted to be together with.
There was a hint of that same sensation now, standing in line at the waterslide with Jude and Nash, holding their hands. Merit inhaled and tried to hang on to it: the scent of sunscreen and chlorine, the sun on her shoulders, her sons’ exuberant, uncomplicated grins.
In front of them, a child let go of the handles at the top of the slide and disappeared down the flume. Merit’s breath escaped with a short, frenzied whoosh. Time was like that slide, sucking the moments right from under her as she just stood there with her bathing suit riding up her butt and a vague background headache, waiting for something spectacular to happen.
Except, she realized suddenly: It already had.
“You’re up,” the attendant called to them.
“Mommy,” Jude said, yanking her arm forward. “It’s our turn.”
Beside her, Nash bounced on his toes, shivering with excitement and fear.
