I took another sip of wine. I turned my head to look at the lake. I inhaled slowly, letting the aroma of beef fill me up. I was starving. It always amazed me how lying around in the sun stirred my appetite. Maybe it was some weird blend of sexual desire, brought out by lying half-naked on soft sand, bleeding into other animal desires—the heat, amplified by a drink or two, salty snacks, the tranquility of the lake.
I felt someone beside me and turned my attention back to our guests. Joe was standing over me holding the bottle of wine. “Top it off?”
“No thanks.” I moved my glass away.
He was very good-looking, with dark, longish hair that gave him a bad-boy aura, and a smile that made you warm to him despite knowing he might be trouble. He had a pent-up energy that made it almost impossible to ignore his presence whenever he entered a room. Both of them were very charismatic. But they didn’t seem to feel the need to compete with each other, unlike a lot of couples who are over-endowed with charm.
He stayed there, looking down at me as if he knew I would change my mind and ask for a refill. The very idea that he might believe he knew my thoughts increased my determination to refuse his offer. What I really needed was a glass of water. Watching Skye continue to sip absentmindedly from hers made my lips feel dry, my tongue parched and sticky inside my mouth.
Joe placed the bottle on the table beside me and wandered over to the barbecue. “They look done.”
“Another minute and a half,” Brad said.
I eased myself out of the lounge chair. I left my wineglass beside the bottle and went into the house. The wine hadn’t stopped the twitching in my fingers, and I felt their weakness as I lifted the ceramic bowl of pasta and al dente vegetables tossed with vinaigrette out of the fridge. I placed the bowl on the counter and rubbed my hands on my jeans, trying to steady them. Maybe the twitching was a sign of dehydration. I was sure I’d read that once. I filled a glass with water and drank the entire thing. My tongue and lips felt better, but the twitching didn’t abate.
The best thing was to keep my hands busy. I carried the salads to the table, re-folded a napkin that wasn’t straight, and placed clean wine goblets on the table. Completely unnecessary to use another set of glasses, but it gave me something else to do.
I returned to the kitchen for serving utensils. I poured water into glasses and sliced up a lime to add some zest.
The voices of the others grew louder as they moved into the dining room. When I finally steadied my hands enough to carry the tray of water glasses to the dining room, the others were seated at the table, a juicy steak on each plate.
As Brad raised his glass for a toast, I tried to remember a younger, fresher version of us. Because of my wandering thoughts, I failed to notice what he said. I studied his mouth as it moved around the words. It seemed as if his face belonged to a stranger. Had I ever known him? Was everyone, ultimately, a stranger? Right at that moment, I felt like I knew Darren better than any other person in my life. And I was sure he knew me as well. With him, there were no historical landmines, although I was pretty sure we were very close to building them.
While we ate, I half-listened to the others and let my thoughts continue to circle around Darren. As I had a hundred times before, I tried to locate any threads of guilt for cheating on my husband. It should have been there. Guilt was the normal response to betraying your spouse. It was right to feel guilt, but I just couldn’t seem to find it anywhere inside me.
It wasn’t as if the guilt had been washed away by love for another man, because I was certain I was not in love with Darren. I had fun with Darren, I had great sex with him, my body ached for him when we were apart, but I didn’t love him. So what was it? Had cheating numbed all my feelings until all that remained was my body, acting out of habit?
Sometimes I wondered if I was completely dead inside. Had living with Brad, trying to make room for Brad’s all-consuming career, deadened my heart? Brad thrived in his role as a marriage counselor. Most evenings, it was all he talked about. Not the individual couples and their problems, but his reaction to their pain, his strategies for helping them move forward. The blog had shot his passion full of steroids. He enjoyed knowing he was helping people, enjoyed knowing he had impact outside of our small part of the world. It was a good feeling to be asked your opinion. I liked it when people turned to me for my decorating and sales expertise, so I understood how that made him feel, but it still seemed to get in the way.
Brad believed he was doing good in the world. And he was, I had no doubts about that. But he treated most other professions as slightly less important than his. He revered physicians and religious leaders and the occasional politician or philanthropist, but any job that wasn’t making the world demonstrably better, was less significant.
He was thrilled when he saved a couple’s love for each other, as he put it. My opinion was that marriages either were poised for divorce or only suffering slight damage. He nudged them in one direction or the other, but he didn’t save marriages. He didn’t reunite people.
And Brad resented me for that viewpoint as much as I resented him for believing he was single-handedly restoring love and happiness to the world, one couple at a time.
We didn’t fight about these things, not often, but they weighed on us, and they poisoned a lot of our conversations. His job made me feel as if another woman was living in our house—the first thing he thought of when he woke in the morning, his clients’ stories and problems living inside his head while we ate dinner, when we attended parties, when we took vacations, and sometimes, I imagined, when we made love.
All those people with their newly recovered, healthy, satisfying, life-giving relationships, thanks to Brad Fromm. I sometimes felt invisible.
With Darren, who owned a popular, upscale bar, I never thought about healing people or guiding them to experience transparency and honesty. I didn’t feel like Darren was actively considering the steps a man should take to please a woman while we were making love. We relished the sheer pleasure, our brains turned off. With Brad, I couldn’t help wondering whether a certain touch of his hand on my body would be offered as a useful technique in a counseling session, or alluded to on his blog. Without identifying me, but still…
I was thrilled with his blog, at first. He never wrote anything that would embarrass or shame me, nothing that made me feel exposed. He was very good at weaving together stories about us with textbook anecdotes, but it had started to grate on me after a while.
Darren came along, and…I suppose I just needed a change of pace, a break.
Now, it wasn’t a break at all. I expect things like that never are for very long.
Maybe Darren was falling in love with me. But if he was, I didn’t want to know. I wanted to stay married to Brad. I just wanted him to change a little. I wanted both of us to change, to go back to how we were at some point that I couldn’t even identify. Brad himself would tell me that you can never work on your marriage by expecting the other person to change. You have to accept them as they are.
At any rate, I still loved Brad, and I wanted the cheating to end. It was complicated. I felt as if I wasn’t entirely living my own life, that I inhabited this secret world where I had sex with Darren, and then re-emerged into my own world, where part of me was always missing.
“You’re a woman of mystery,” Joe said.