She’d smiled at him and left the room before she’d be forced to decide if the man she’d married was just a tiny bit crazy.
On the other hand, she never had to worry about him whining or bitching or kvetching in any way. Sebastian, no surprise, had been a whiner. A glass-half-empty negativist who showed in a thousand ways, both large and small, that he believed the world awoke every morning thinking about ways to urinate in his food. Brian, on the other hand, seemed to approach each day as if there was a present hidden somewhere within it. And if he didn’t find it, there’d be no point bitching about it.
Another Brianism: “A complaint that’s not looking for a solution is a disease that’s not looking for a cure.”
Caleb said, “He loves quoting that one at the office. I keep expecting to see it on a plaque someday, hanging in the waiting room.”
“You gotta admit, though, it really works for him. You ever known Brian to stay in a bad mood more than a few minutes?”
He nodded. “I’ll give you that. Why, some people would follow him into a burning cave—they just feel he’d get them out the other side somehow.”
She liked that. It made her see her husband as heroic for a moment, a leader, an inspiration.
She sat back in her chair and Caleb sat back in his and for a minute or so neither of them said a word.
“You look good,” Caleb said eventually. “I mean, you always look good, but you look . . .”
She watched him search for the word.
He found it. “Secure.”
Had anyone ever said that about her? Her mother used to say she rushed around so much she would’ve forgotten her head most days if it wasn’t already attached. Two ex-boyfriends and her ex-husband had all told her she was “anxious.” In her twenties, alcohol, cigarettes, and books, always books, could anchor her in place. When she quit smoking, a treadmill replaced the window seat until her doctor, noting a rash of shin splints and a pretty significant weight drop in a body that was never in danger of being overweight, convinced her to complement the running with yoga. Worked well for a while, but the yoga eventually led to the “visions” and the visions, post-Haiti, led to the panic attacks.
Secure. No one had ever accused her of that. What could make Rachel Childs-Delacroix appear secure?
Her phone vibrated by her elbow. A text from Brian. She opened it. She smiled.
There stood Brian, still in the clothes he’d worn today, smiling big, if a bit blearily, his hair mussed from travel. Behind him, a facade of brown wainscoting, wide double doors, large yellow lanterns hanging from either side of the entrance, and above it all the name of the establishment, COVENT GARDEN HOTEL. He’d sent her a few pictures of the street over the years—a curved tidy London street of retail shops and restaurants, red brick and white trim. The doorman, or whoever took the photo, would have had to step off the sidewalk to get the full facade of the hotel into the frame.
Brian was waving, a shit-eating grin dominating his handsome, weary face, as if letting her know he understood this wasn’t just an ordinary selfie, she didn’t just “miss him.” This had been a test of sorts.
And damn, she thought as she slid the phone into her pocket, did you ever pass.
She and Caleb did end up sharing a cab. He had the farther trip; he lived in the Seaport District. On the short ride back to her place they kept the conversation on the rain and the effect on the local economy. The Red Sox, for example, were approaching a Major League Baseball record for rainouts.
At her place, Caleb leaned in for the kiss to the cheek and she was already turning away when his lips landed.
In the condo, she took a shower and the hot water hitting skin pickled throughout the day by cold rain was so exquisite it felt sinful. She closed her eyes and could see Caleb in the bar and then in the pantry, and she flashed on Brian the last time they’d been in this shower together, just a few days ago, and he’d slipped up behind her and run the bar of soap over each nipple, then up one side of her neck and down the other and caressed her abdomen with it in an ever-shrinking circle.
She duplicated his efforts now, could feel him hardening between her legs. She could hear her own breathing mingle with the shower spray as Brian became Caleb and Caleb became Brian and she dropped the soap to the tile and placed one hand to the wall. She thought of Brian in the shower the other day and Brian in front of the Covent Garden Hotel, that shit-eating grin of his, those blue eyes filled with boyish glee. Caleb vanished. She used a single finger to bring herself to a climax that moved through her body as if the hot water had entered her and flushed her capillaries.
After, she lay in bed and was drifting to sleep when an odd thought occurred to her:
When he’d decided to order dinner, Caleb had said he’d spent the entire day—10 A.M. to 5 P.M.—behind his desk. Said he never got up. Never went out. But when she’d shown up outside the building, he’d just been exiting. He still hadn’t stepped out from under the overhang above the door.
Yet his coat and his hat had been soaking wet.
16
REENTRY
Friday. The return.
She thought about picking him up at the airport, but she didn’t own a car anymore. She’d sold it when she moved in with Brian; the condo came with only one parking spot. After that, she’d driven Zipcars if she needed to get somewhere. She couldn’t believe how convenient they were actually—one lot was within a block of the condo—but then came the Dunkin’ Donuts and the food court and the vomiting on the Scientologist. After that, Brian asked her not to drive for a bit.
When it came time to renew her license, they had one of their fiercer fights. She couldn’t imagine not renewing, but he countered that he was owed—owed—peace of mind. “It’s not about you,” she recalled shouting across the kitchen bar. “Why do you think everything’s about you? Even this?”
Mr. Unflappable slapped the kitchen bar top. “Who did they call when you couldn’t leave the food court? And who did they call when—?”
“So this is about intrusions on your time?” She twisted a dish towel around one hand, tightening it until the blood bloomed under her skin.
“No, no, no. I’m not going to play that.”
“No, no, no,” she mimicked, feeling like an asshole, but feeling good too because the fight had been building for a week by that point.
For a microsecond, she thought she caught a rage bordering on hatred slip through his eyes before he took a long, slow breath. “An elevator doesn’t go sixty miles an hour.”
She was still back at that flash of rage. Was that the real Brian I just saw?
Eventually she realized it wouldn’t return. Not today anyway. She dropped the dish towel to the counter. “What?”
“You can’t get mortally wounded if you have a panic attack in an elevator or a mall or, I dunno, in a park or walking down the street. But in a car?”
“It doesn’t work that way. I don’t have panic attacks when I’m driving.”
“You only started having these things a few years ago. How do you know how the next one will manifest? I don’t want to get the call that you’re wrapped around a pole somewhere.”
“Jesus.”
He said, “Is it an unreasonable fear?”
“No,” she admitted.
“Out of the realm of possibility?”
“No, it’s not.”
“What if you started having trouble breathing, you’re sweating so hard you can’t see through it, and you hit somebody in a crosswalk?”
“Now you’re bullying.”
“No, I’m just asking.”
In the end, they reached a compromise. She renewed her license but promised not to use it.
But now that she’d strolled through a mall and ridden the subway, walked past old South Church into Copley Square, taken a cab through the rain, and sat in a crowded basement bar and all of it without a single uptick in her heart rate, not a single twitch in a throat vein, wouldn’t it be cool to show up outside bagg
age claim at Logan? He’d freak, of course, but would his apprehension be overwhelmed by his pride?
She went so far as to update her Zipcar account info—the credit card she’d first used had expired—but then remembered he’d driven himself to the airport and left the Infiniti in long-term parking.
So that was that. Her gratitude at being able to pass the cup induced some guilt—she felt gutless, weak—but maybe it was better she not drive if even the scantest trepidation remained.
When he came through the door, he wore the mildly surprised look of a man trying to reacquaint himself with the part of his life that didn’t include airports and hotels and room service and constant change but the opposite—routine. He glanced at the magazine basket she’d placed by the sofa as if he couldn’t place it, because he couldn’t; she’d purchased it while he was gone. He wheeled his suitcase to a corner and took off his copper raincoat and said, “Hey,” with an uncertain smile.
“Hey.” She hesitated before she crossed the apartment to him.
If he’d been away for more than twenty-four hours, there was always a hiccup or two upon reentry. An awkward stumble toward reassembly. He’d left their lives, after all, the things that defined them as “we,” which meant they each had spent the week becoming “I.” And just when that had become the new normal, he stepped back into the frame. And they tried to figure out where “I” ended and “we” began again.
They kissed and it was dry, almost chaste.
“You tired?” she asked because he looked it.
“Yeah. Yeah, I am.” He looked at his watch. “It’s, what, midnight over there.”
“I made you some dinner.”
He smiled broadly and easily, the first real Brian smile since he’d come through the door. “No way. Going all domestic on me and whatnot? Thanks, babe.”
He kissed her a second time and this one had a little heat to it. She felt something loosen in her and returned the kiss in kind.
They sat and ate salmon cooked in foil with brown rice and a salad. He asked her about her week and she asked him about London and the conference, which apparently hadn’t gone well.
“They set up these boards so they can convince the world they give a shit about the environment and the ethics of timber acquisition. Then they stack the board with industry assholes whose only ambition besides sampling the local hookers is to make sure nothing gets done.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms and sighed. “It’s, um, frustrating.” He looked down at his empty plate. “You?”
“What about me?”
“You seemed off whenever we talked on the phone.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Sure?”
“Uh-huh.”
As he yawned into his fist and gave her a weary smile, it was clear he didn’t believe her. “I’m gonna shower.”
“Okay.”
He cleared their plates and put them in the dishwasher. As he headed for the bedroom, she said, “All right. You want to know?”
He turned just short of the doorway and let loose a soft sigh of relief. Held out his hands. “That would be lovely.”
“I saw your double.”
“My double?”
She nodded. “Getting into a black Suburban behind the Hancock on Monday afternoon.”
“When I was in the air?” He stared back at her, confused. “So, give me a sec here because I’m wiped . . . uh, you saw a guy who looked like me and—”
“No, I saw your double.”
“So maybe you saw Scott—”
“—Pfeiffer of Grafton, Vermont? I considered that. Problem was, this guy was also dressed in the exact same clothes you left the house in.”
He took that in with a slow nod. “You didn’t think you saw my double. You thought you saw me.”
She poured them both a little more wine and brought his glass to him. She leaned against the back of the couch. He leaned against the doorjamb.
“Yes.”
“Ah.” He closed his eyes and smiled and a weight seem to rise from his body and leave through the vent above him. “So the weird tone and the selfie you wanted me to send that was all because you thought . . .” He opened his eyes. “You thought what?”
“I didn’t know what I thought.”
“Well, you either thought Scott Pfeiffer made a trip into Boston or that I was lying about being out of the country.”
“Something like that.” It sounded so ridiculous now.
He grimaced and drank some wine.
“What?” she asked. “No, what?”
“You think that little of us?”
“No.”
“You thought I was living some kind of double life.”
“I definitely didn’t say that.”
“Well, what else would it be? You claim you saw me on a street in Boston when I was on a 767 over probably, I dunno, Greenland by that point. So you grill me about where I am when I call from Heathrow and you grill me about not charging my phone and—”
“I didn’t grill you.”
“No? And then you ask me to take a picture of myself so I can prove I’m, you know, exactly where I’d fucking said I’d be, and then you go out with my partner and, what, grill him too?”
“I’m not going to listen to this.”
“Why would you? You might actually have to take responsibility for acting like an asshole.” He lowered his head and held up a weary hand. “You know what? I’m tired. I’m not going to say anything helpful right now. And I need to, I dunno, process this. Okay?”
She tried to decide how angry she wanted to stay and if she was mad at him or just herself. “You called me an asshole.”
“No, I said you were acting like one.” A thin smile. “It’s a small distinction but a meaningful one.”
She gave him back her own thin smile, placed a hand to his chest. “Go take your shower.”
He closed the bedroom door behind him and she could hear the water run.
She found herself standing over his raincoat. She put her wine on a side table and wondered why she didn’t feel guilt right now. She should; he was right—she’d walked down an insulting road thinking her husband of two years was so untrustworthy that he’d lie about which city he was in. But she didn’t feel guilt. All week she’d told herself that what she’d seen had been an optical illusion. The selfie proved it. Their own history together, one in which she’d never known him to lie about anything, proved it.
So why didn’t she feel mistaken? Why didn’t she feel guilty about mistrusting him? Not wholeheartedly, of course, not with full certitude. But just a little bit, just a niggling sense that all was not as it should be.
She took his raincoat off the back of the chair where he’d left it, a pet peeve of hers. He couldn’t just reach into the hall closet and hang it on a hanger?
She reached into the left pocket and came back with an airline ticket—Heathrow to Logan, dated today—and some loose change. His passport was there too. She opened it and rifled through the visa pages, which were cramped with stamps from all the countries he’d visited. Problem was, the stamps weren’t in any kind of order. They seemed to show up on whichever page the immigration officer had decided to flip to that day. She listened to the muffled sound of the water running in the bathroom and continued to rifle the pages—Croatia, Greece, Russia, Germany, and then there it was: Heathrow on May 9, this year. She returned the passport to his coat and reached into the other pocket: a swipe card for the Covent Garden Hotel, 10 Monmouth Street, and a tiny receipt the size of her thumb for a news and magazine shop just up the street at 17 Monmouth. It was dated today, 05/09/14, 11:12 in the morning, and gave evidence that Brian bought a newspaper, a pack of gum, and a bottle of Orangina, and paid with a 10-pound note and received 4.53 pounds sterling as change.
The shower turned off. She put the swipe card back in the pocket of the coat and returned the coat to the back of the chair. But she slipped the receipt into the back pocket of her jeans. She had no idea why.
Instinct.
17
GATTIS
Every year, on the anniversary of the night they met, Brian and Rachel returned to the RR and danced to “Since I Fell for You.” If it could be found on a jukebox these days, it was usually the Johnny Mathis version, but the RR’s jukebox had the original version, the granddaddy of them all by one-hit wonder Lenny Welch.
It wasn’t a love song so much as it was a loss song, the lament of someone trapped in a hopeless addiction to a heartless lover who will, there is no doubt, ultimately destroy him. Or her, depending on which version you listened to. Since their first dance to the song, they’d heard most of them—Nina Simone’s, Dinah Washington’s, Charlie Rich’s, George Benson’s, Gladys Knight’s, Aaron Neville’s, and Mavis Staples’s. And those were just the headliners. Rachel had once looked it up on iTunes and found two hundred and sixty-four versions, performed by everyone from Louis Armstrong to Captain & Tennille.
This year, Brian rented out the whole back room and invited some friends. Melissa showed up. So did Danny Marotta, Rachel’s former cameraman at 6; Danny brought his wife, Sandra, and Sandra brought a coworker, Liz; Annie, Darla, and Rodney, who’d all accepted buyouts from the Globe in the years since she’d left, dropped by. Caleb showed up with Haya, somehow dressed to lay waste in a simple black cotton sheath dress and black flats, black hair swept back off the curve of her elegant neck in an updo, and all of her made somehow earthier and even sexier by the baby on her hip. The perfect baby, by the way, the dark good looks of both parents fused into a child with the most symmetrical face, eyes of warm black oil, skin the color of desert sand just after sundown. Rachel caught Brian, usually circumspect in such matters, pushing his eyeballs back into his head a few times when Haya and AB passed by, like some fantastical ur-humans who’d stepped from a creation myth. Haya got some of the youngest guys—Brian and Caleb’s latest interns, no point in learning their names, they’d be replaced with new ones the next time she looked—to take long looks, even though all their female counterparts were blindingly pretty and flush with firm, unblemished early-twenties flesh.