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It used to be the other way around. I’d fall in deep slumber within minutes with Jack in bed next to me, and if I woke up, I’d find him gone. Sometimes I’d go downstairs to check and he’d be in his office, typing furiously at his computer. “Come back to bed,” I’d say. He wouldn’t look at me. He’d be hunched over, bleary-eyed, with only the light from the screen illuminating his face. “In a minute,” he’d say, and I’d clock the bottle of scotch on the desk and know it would be a lot longer than a minute, but I wouldn’t say anything. I’d go back upstairs and fall asleep again.
Jack starts snoring and I stare at the ceiling, remembering Bronwyn’s face when she said it.He’s kissing her, Laura. They’ve been making out all afternoon.She wasn’t even gloating. She was matter of fact almost, except when she said,where the hell have you been?She looked at me with disbelief mixed with pity. Like she couldn’t understand how I’d been so oblivious. Had everyone else seen Jack and Summer together? Did they really kiss? Of course not. I tell myself that she misunderstood. Summer said nothing happened and Jack said they were playing hide and seek with the kids. I mean, sure, unlikely, when I think about it, Jack is not the kind of dad who’d kick a ball around the park with Charlie on a Sunday morning—God, she’d love that, maybe I should make it happen—but then again, it was her birthday party, he was making an effort to participate. A big effort. I think back to the moment Bronwyn brought out her cake, the sight of Jack and Bronwyn standing close together singing Happy Birthday to Charlie, Jack hamming it up in a loud tenor voice, Bronwyn…well, Bronwyn singing beautifully, obviously. Anyone would have thought they were a happily married couple gazing affectionately at their happy child at her eighth’s birthday party, while I stood on the sidelines, sticking paper plates smeared with ketchup in a trash bag and picking modeling clay out of a little boy’s left nostril.
So anyway, back to Jack and Summer, of course nothing untoward happened. Bronwyn’s just jealous, which was the point of the exercise, so I don’t know why I feel so bad. Maybe that’s why she said it.They’ve been making out all afternoon.Shewantsme to feel bad. My thoughts race off in every direction like a bunch of feral cats and I think, wait. There’s always an agenda with Bronwyn. She’s trying to destabilize my relationship. If she really, really thought Jack and Summer weremaking out,she would have been upset about it. She wants me to believe it because she wants him for herself.
I hear a creak outside on the landing and immediately wonder if it’s Charlie. I’ve bound myself in sheets tossing and turning and it takes a moment to free myself. I get out of bed without waking Jack, slip on my robe and go out to take a look.
Charlie is asleep, with her little moonlight on. I kiss her forehead, and on the way back to my room I notice Bronwyn’s door is ajar. Her bedside lamp is on and her bed looks like it hasn’t been slept in yet. The bathroom door is half open, dark, and I figure that it was her I heard earlier, and that she’s gone out for a cigarette.
I haven’t been in Bronwyn’s room since she arrived and it is just as I would have expected. Pristine, neat, smelling of expensive perfume. Her bed is turned down, one corner opened diagonally like in a hotel and I wonder with a lurch whether her and Jack have made love inthatbed while I’ve been at work, and I lift the corner of the sheet—white, one million deniers please, Egyptian cotton, organically grown and rinsed in filtered water—up to my face and smell it, but all I can detect is her perfume, and I flatten it back down the way it was. I glance at the dresser. It’s covered with a million jars of cream and enough makeup to do the entire cast ofCats, all carefully arranged in rows, by type—beauty products on the left, makeup on the right—and size, with pencils laid down in a gold tray. The effect is not unlike a beauty display at a Bergdorf Goodman store. I open the top drawer of the dresser. She keeps her lingerie in there, but unlike my drawer, which looks like a grab bag of old cotton underwear from the local thrift store, hers is arranged in rows of matching panties and bras folded carefully together into neat little piles of delicate silk and lace, all unbelievably expensive no doubt and exquisitely feminine.
I’m not even thinking about what I’m doing it. I shove my hands in the drawer and rumple everything up into an entangled mess. Then suddenly I realize someone has opened—or closed—a door, and my ears prick up, trying to work out where it came from, and when I look back at what I’ve done, I panic. I try to put it all back the way it was, but there’s a lot of black and a lot of red and it’s hard to tell which panties go with which bra. My fingers touch something. A small Ziploc bag of blue pills. Where were they? I don’t know. I push them at the back, keep folding her underwear into neat little piles, my heart hammering, and close the drawer.
As I turn to leave, I catch something out the window that makes me stop. A square of light illuminates the stone path, which means the light is on in my studio.
She’s in there.
I’m annoyed now. It’s twenty-five past one in the morning, and she has no right being there, inmystudio. Ever since she got here, she has behaved like this is still her house, and she has silently recast me as the visitor. I wonder how long before she asks us to move out of our bedroom because it has a better aspect and a larger closet. I wonder what she’s doing down there. Rearranging my art supplies? Moving the worktable back to where she had it before?
By now I’m heaving with anger. I walk down the stairs in my bare feet, find the door to my studio is wide open.
She has her back to me, standing in front of my worktable, dressed in a diaphanous lilac silk negligée, matching pointed-toe mules with a strip of soft feathers across the top.
I, on the other hand, am wearing my Terry-cloth robe which was white, once, and has a big orange stain on the front left pocket where Charlie dropped a felt pen that leaked for an hour before I noticed anything. I look down at my bare feet and wonder when I last had a pedicure. At this point I’m thinking it doesn’t matter if she’s in my workroom. I’ve got nothing to hide. I mean, sure, I wish I’d tidied up. I bet she kept it pristine when she lived here.
I quietly turn around to leave when she says, “Laura, who is Beth?”
I close my eyes briefly, my stomach twisting onto itself. “Who?” I ask. I sound so fake even to my ears, I want to punch myself.
She turns around slowly. One of my cardboard storage boxes is on the table, the ones I store my paper and craft supplies in. I must have left it there after Charlie’s party.
It’s opened, and my heart feels like lead. When I look at her again, her face is white. She’s holding something in her right hand, and it says something about how scared I am of her, deep down, that for a crazy moment I think it’s a knife. But it’s not. It’s a small yellow notebook, the kind you buy in packs of five for a dollar from the corner store. This one is old, you can tell from the tattered corners and the fading cover.
“I don’t know who you mean,” I say.
“The woman who wrote love letters to my husband, remember her?”
She pushes a lock of hair from her forehead, fingertips brushing softly against powdery skin.
“Did you know her? Is that why she borrowed your notepad?” She opens it to a page and shows it to me. Her hand is trembling. She looks like she’s going to cry.
I put my fingers over my mouth as I stare at the page. I’d used the notebook to practice a different handwriting so Bronwyn wouldn’t twig that it was me. I feel my cheeks burn as I stare at my own handwritten lines, mostly crossed out. They all say the same thing.That was amazing today. Over and over, in increasingly slanted script. At the bottom of the page I signed,Beth x, then I crossed it out, signed again, rinse, repeat. One kiss, two kisses, a practiced signature, each time with minor variations. I remember vividly when I slipped that final note in the pocket of Jack’s jeans, the small one tucked against the right hip, knowing that it would be Bronwyn who would find it, because Bronwyn always went through Jack’s pockets.
She looks slowly through other pages and I don’t need to see them to remember what’s on them. Shopping lists, canvas measurements.Buy acrylic white!And then more practice…I love you,crossed out,I love you,crossed out,I love you. Beth xox.
“Why are you going through my things?” I ask.
“I was looking for something to write on,” she says, still glancing at the pages. “Who is she? Who is Beth?”
“Oh God. I’m sorry,” I say softly.
“I don’t understand.”
I rub my forehead. I can feel my mouth pull down. My lips tremble when I speak again, in a whisper so low she has to lean in to catch it.
“It was me.”
She jerks back, shakes her head over and over, her face clouded with confusion. “I don’t understand, did you love him?”
