“I didn’t give you shit.”
“Oh, no?” She mimicked him. “Why don’t you just do it during the day, why don’t you do it with Kim?”
“Well, why don’t you?”
“Because I don’t want to! Because I want one evening every month where I go to the city and have my hair done by a guy who got written up in Allure, and then have a little dinner, and maybe go to a movie, or go to Barnes and Noble. Why is that so hard to accept? Why do I always have to fit my life into a little snippet of time you allot me? Jared, I’m scheduled up the ass, I live and die by the clock.”
“Welcome to the adult world.”
“Yes, yes,” she said with tired impatience. “But you can have a three-hour lunch if you want to. I can’t. You can be out all day driving around, checking out real estate. I can’t. You go to nice restaurants and hang out with adults. I don’t. I’m scheduled to the clock of children. That’s a huge difference.”
“But you have time during the—”
“I have no time during the day! You know what I have during the day?” Larissa broke off under the weight of the deception that wasn’t quite ready to fall off her shoulders, to slide trippingly off her tongue. Kai was cool on the phone, not livid, and this gave her strength and hope. She was going to try one more time to make this right. “You take me completely for granted. You have no idea what I do during the day and worse, you don’t care. For your information, besides cleaning your house and cooking your food and taking care of your children, I’m recasting, painting, rehearsing.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“Which part, Jared?” she asked quietly. “Which part there is my fault?”
“I told you theater was going to be too much. You can’t complain now.”
“I can complain, and you know how you know? Because I’m complaining! But the only thing I’m really complaining about is your awful attitude.” She ran her hand through her sleek hair. He hadn’t even noticed. “You know what? I need to talk to someone. I do. I need to talk to a professional.”
“What?”
“Yes. I can’t…I can’t do this anymore. I’m overwhelmed. At any second, I’m going to have a fucking breakdown. We need to stop speaking, or I really won’t make it.”
“Why did you fire our cleaning lady if you needed help?”
“It’s not about the cleaning lady!”
“She helped you.”
“That’s not the kind of help I need! I need talking help. I need to be by myself help. I need a night class in Drew help. I need…”
“So talk to me.”
“I’m talking to you now and you’re not listening! You’re going on about Ernestina like that’s the answer to all my troubles.”
“I didn’t know you had troubles,” said Jared in grim puzzlement. “I thought we were living an enchanted life.”
“Your life is fucking enchanted,” she spat through her teeth. “That’s how oblivious you are to everything that’s going on.”
“What are you talking about? I—”
“I had my hair done today! Did you notice?”
“You came in, in the middle of a boxing match with yourself!” yelled Jared. “I’m hardly going to be commenting on your hair!”
“Yes, because otherwise you’re very observant, Mr. Reconnaissance man!”
Jared rubbed his face. “Is that what I need to be in my own life, in my own house? Unless you tell me, how do I know you’re not happy?”
“I’m very happy. I’m extremely happy,” Larissa said, with a cruel face, wet eyes, mascara running. “But I’d like to talk to someone about all my happiness, all right? I have so much happiness I can’t deal with it. I feel I’m going to explode from the joy.”
“All right, enough,” Jared said slowly.
“Enough is right. Because, word of fair warning, if your wife ends up in the loony bin, you’ll be rushing home every night, not just once a month, and then we’ll see how you like it when you have to figure out how to get Emily to her cello lessons twice a week while Michelangelo has karate and Asher has cross country, and orthodontics, all at the same time. Let’s see how many late dinners in the city you can have then, Mr. Chief Financial Officer.”
“Larissa, calm down.”
“Why is everybody telling me to calm down?”
“Who is everybody?”
“I will not calm down,” she said. “You calm down. You say things and act in ways that are mean and upsetting, and then you get all high and mighty like I’m the unreasonable one.”
“I’m not acting like anything.” He opened his hands. “I’m sorry, okay? How do I act like this? I’m trying to understand.”
Larissa got Jared to apologize to her! “Well, understand this. Once a month, your wife needs an evening alone without you and without the kids.”
“God, why do you have to make such a big deal about it? Why didn’t you talk to me last week when it came up?”
“Because I wanted you to do the right thing on your own! I wanted you to be considerate, say, okay, Lar. The way you did last summer in Lillypond when you let me have a day on my own. That’s what I wanted. But if you like, I’ll hire a fulltime babysitter so she can cart the kids around while you work.”
“What are you talking about? Stop it.”
She was panting. “I’ll get myself a full-time job in the city, and then I’ll also be away from the house from seven till seven, and maybe then I won’t hear any more bullshit from you about me spending two hours every two months to color my fucking hair.”
“Larissa! What’s gotten into you? Calm down.”
“Oh, I’m calm, Jared. I’m calm like the Pacific.”
“Larissa…”
“I have to put the baby to bed. Are we done?”
“You tell me,” barked Jared.
“Oh, we’re done.” She stormed off upstairs like she was Emily.
4
“Shall We Go?”
Godot was opening for three nights on the following evening, and there had been stage setup all that Thursday morning and a final rehearsal of the last act due in the afternoon. By the time Larissa got to Kai’s, it was after 12:30. He was fully dressed and sitting at the round table by the window.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
He sat like a sphinx, straight up against the chair. His eyes followed her from the door to his table. She sat down across from him. He seemed inaccessible and unmoving.
“Kai…”
He raised his hand to stop her. He didn’t say anything. He just sat with his back up and stared at her, mouth unsmiling, eyes unsmiling. Larissa desperately tried not to break down.
“Don’t be mad at me, please,” she whispered. “I beg you. You know how hard this is for me. I was trying to do something for us, and look what a botch I made of things. I didn’t want to upset you.”
He sat.
A tear ran down her face.
“It’s the middle of February,” Kai finally said.
“I know.”
“Your play is opening tonight. Valentine’s Day is this weekend.”
“I’m not going to dinner with him,” Larissa said. “I have the play. And then it’s our wrap party.”
“No romantic dinner with him, or with me. Soon it’ll be March. A year since we started this little fandango, as you call it, this happy dance between us.”
“Kai…”
“Larissa, I take it all, you know I do. I do because I have a life which I live while I wait for you. I read, I play my instruments, I work. On Sundays I ride up to Rahway and visit Gil. He’s going to be paroled early, we hope, for good behavior. Then I’ll have my buddy back. But in the meantime, on Friday nights I go out with his roomies, Harry and Mark, and we go to Newark with our guitars to jam at the local bars, and I pass the darkened Prudential building, and I think of you being with your family.”
She couldn’t sit as straight as he. Her back was curving, slumping. His eyes were so neutral and his v
oice so flat.
“Let me explain, so you don’t misunderstand,” Kai said. “It’s not about yesterday. Yeah, that was pretty abominable, but it was just one evening, and like I said, I can take it. It’s not about that.” He paused to draw in his breath. His curly hair was loose and wet, his eyes somber, his face clean-shaven. He was going to work soon, and he looked almost ready to bolt out the door. “You know what it’s about?”
She shook her head.
“It’s about my life. And it’s about yours.”
“Please don’t be upset with me,” she repeated in a whisper. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise. I don’t know how, but I will.”
“Yesterday was you trying to make it up to me,” he said. “Trying to make up to me for the twenty-three hours a day you deny me. But you understand it couldn’t have gone any other way?”
“No, it will, it’ll be better.”
He shook his head. “It’ll never be better. This is the way it is. That was the best it could be.”
“No, there’s something I can do—”
He emitted a short skeptical laugh. “Maybe you can leave him. Come here and live with your Stanley.”
She didn’t say anything, the shame and degradation of that impossibility denying her the voice and the resources to answer even in the negative.
“You must’ve thought about it. I know I have. We don’t talk about it because there’s no point. We don’t talk about it because we both know it’s impossible!” The exclamation at the end was the only time today Kai had raised the pitch of his voice. Larissa didn’t know how he did that, talked so calmly about calamities. She would have preferred he yelled, howled, got up, threw things. At least that would have been understandable. And yet his composure, his placid, equable nature was the thing she kept returning to—the thing that bonded her to him so utterly: that he, of all the chaos out there, didn’t make her life hell for the hallowed trap they found themselves in. When she was with him, it was always sunshine. Which is why she kept coming back. But today she needed the Kai that didn’t exist, the Kai of resentful words, of shouting, because this guise of pretend preternatural cool frightened her.
She shook her head. “Talking isn’t pointless,” she said.
“You and I both know,” said Kai, “you can not, cannot, move in here with me, and have your children come visit you here, sit in this small space, at this table and look across the room to the bed where a young kid, a few years older than your son, just fucked their mother!” He paused, staring at her breathless. “You and I both know it can’t be done. This is exile. You will lose your children. You will humiliate them, and they won’t be able to look you in the face, the older ones especially. They’ll choose not to see you. You’ll be able to get only supervised visits, with a court-appointed stranger present. You’ll be condemned. You know how I know? Because my own father had to leave his family rather than introduce us to the nineteen-year-old mango seller he got all sweet on. Or was it he couldn’t introduce her to us? He turned his back on his kids either way. And we condemned him. Anyway, without me telling you, you know this. Which is why you’ve never brought it up.”
Tears trickled down Larissa’s cheeks. She kept wiping them with her cotton sleeve. Reaching over, he ripped off a paper towel and handed it to her. Ezra was right. An examined life was no picnic.
“We had it pretty good for a while, Larissa,” Kai said. “But I think you and I reached the end of the line.”
“Kai, please! No. Let’s wait. Just a little while…let’s…please, I’ll work it out. Give me a chance.”
“A chance to what?”
“To fix this.”
“You can fix this?”
“I can.”
“I don’t see how.”
“I will. You’ll see. What happened yesterday won’t happen again.”
“Of course it will.”
Mutely Larissa shook her head. She was shivering. Opening her hands to him, she whispered, her voice quivering, “Kai, please…have mercy on me.”
Sighing, blinking, finally rising out of the chair, Kai did.
In bed they lay naked facing each other. Her arms were wrapped around him. His were resting on her but distantly, like Pacific atolls.
“Kai, you know how I feel about you,” Larissa said. “You know. I don’t have to tell you.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” he agreed. “I know. But, Larissa, I’m at the end of my rope with being your leather-jacketed toy. I never asked myself how long I’d be able to take it. Last night, I had my answer. Not much more. I’m just about done.”
His face was between her palms as she kissed him, tasting her own salty tears.
“Don’t give up on me just yet,” she whispered. “I’m going to go talk to a psychiatrist. He’ll help me figure things out.”
“Will he?”
“Absolutely.”
His hands drifted down between her legs. His mouth drifted down to her breasts. He kissed her nipples while he caressed her. “If this can’t help you figure things out, I don’t know what the good doctor is going to do for you. Perhaps he has moves I don’t have.”
She moaned. He opened her up. She opened her mouth to taste him.
Eleven minutes.
“The play should be called Waiting for Larissa,” he said, pushing inside her.
Clutching him around the neck, she moaned, lifting her arms to grasp the headboard. “You don’t have to wait for me, my whole heart, my lover,” she said, crying from love, from sadness, from fear. “I’m right here.”
Four red walls of roses later, thirst amplified not slaked, he whispered, quoting Vladimir: “Shall we go, Larissa?”
“Yes, let’s go.”
They do not move.
5
The Mungo Wilderness
Godot, much to Leroy’s irritating self-satisfaction, was an unqualified success both with the parents and the children, despite a cast of four and a set of one barren tree in stage fright.
Maggie put her hand on Larissa, who was sitting in the dark, waiting for the curtain to rise with the script on her nervous lap. She hoped no one would forget his lines. There were so many lines, and on that bare stage there was no hiding.
“You can come with me,” Maggie said solicitously.
“Come with you where?”
“To the monastery.”
“Monastery! Why on earth would I do that?” She was trapped between Jared and Maggie.
Maggie lowered her voice. “Jared told us you’re having a hard time.”
“I’m not having a hard time.” Larissa couldn’t even move away, because it meant moving closer to Jared! “I’m fine.”
“Jared said you needed someone to talk to.”
“Not like that, Mags. Not a priest or anything. Somebody, you know, professional.”
In the darkened theater with other people chatting about movies and TV shows and ice cream flavors, this is the conversation Larissa was having!
“The nuns sing beautiful psalms, so beautiful they pierce your soul. You really should come.” Maggie closed her eyes. “O my God, I cry in the daytime…deliver my soul from the sword,” she softly murmured.
How’s it been working out, the deliverance? Larissa wanted to ask. Taking a breath, she said instead, “Has it helped you?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Of course. I found peace. You think it’s easy to come to peace with the fact that your body is giving out?”
“I should think not. But singing isn’t quite what I’m looking for. Believe it or not, I’m all good with songs.” Do the nuns play acoustic strings? Do they have deep baritones? Do they sing of soul kitchens and soft parades?
Maggie still hadn’t taken her sympathetic hand away from Larissa’s forearm. What was the etiquette for yanking it away?
“You can always talk to me, Lar. You know that. I understand things. I finally figured it out!—why I’m suffering. Why we all suffer—”
“Excuse me for a sec.” Larissa patted Maggie on the arm and quickly stood up. “I need to make sure they remember to enter from stage left so they walk across the entire stage. I’ll be right back.”
For a moment, as she scanned the darkness of the school auditorium, her breath stopped because she thought she saw Kai up high, in the rafters. She wanted to call out to him, up in the tower. You know what my soft morning laud is? O grant me one more day, one more hour when I can still travel the street in the cold to sit in warmth for a blink in the afternoon before everything—beauty, sadness, doom in that blue attic room—comes crashing like skulls tumbling down stone mountains.
All the performances were sold out, even this Thursday one, but she didn’t see him, not even when the lights came on at the end. She must have imagined his eyes on her.
The small cast got a long standing ovation and flowers. Larissa and Jared had made up, had come to a truce. She apologized, he bought her roses and chocolates. “Are we really not going out to dinner for Valentine’s Day?” It was like he couldn’t believe the confluence of events that would make the closing night of Godot fall on Valentine’s Day.
“How can we, Jared? The play is at seven, and at ten, we have the wrap party.” She told him they would go to dinner on Sunday; the celebration would be a day late. But on Sunday, they took the kids to Watchung Mountain and went sledding. They were gone all day, and in the evening as they were coming back, it was inconceivable that they should go back home, drop off the kids, and then go out to eat by themselves. It was already so late. They found a perfectly nice hibachi steakhouse in Mountainside and had a lovely family dinner with their chatty and tired children.
On Monday after Valentine’s Day, Kai had one hundred and forty-four red roses for Larissa at his place, twelve for each month he had known her. They were scattered around the room in twelve glass vases, on the nightstand, on the coffee table, on the counters, and two vases on the floor by her side of the bed. She now had a side of the bed, like she belonged here on Sunday morning. It was near the open window from where the distant oceans waved their salty winds into her gasping mouth.