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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781401307486 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hachette Books |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2007 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.90(d) |
| Age Range: | 13 - 18 Years |
About the Author
Anne Taylor Fleming is a nationally recognized journalist and CNN NewsNight with Aaron Brown contributor. She is a regular on-camera essayist for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and the author of Motherhood Deferred: A Woman's Journey. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Town&Country, and More. She has been a radio commentator for NBC. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, journalist Karl Fleming.
Read an Excerpt
AS IF LOVE WERE ENOUGH
A NovelBy Anne Taylor Fleming
HYPERION
Copyright © 2006 Anne Taylor FlemingAll right reserved.
ISBN: 1-4013-0105-3
Chapter One
I never meant to fall in love with a married man. Who in their right mind-or right heart-would do such a thing? It is the route of sure pain, of melodrama, of comings and goings, of clutchings and leavings, the stuff of grand opera and soap opera. And if you are single, as I was and am, it is to settle for a half-life-only he is doing the coming and going while you wait, by the phone, the door, the bed, always part of you alert for his reappearance and disappearance, as I have done again this weekend. Coming into them, I always anticipate the voluptuous loneliness these weekends bring, pajamas all day, the special provender I lay in: a bottle of Cabernet, cartons of takeout, a video or two, and, yes, sometimes a tabloid or two as well. They are trashy and distracting when the hours go on and sleep won't come and the Ambien isn't working and you've watched the world's woes scroll by ad nauseum on the cable channels, flicking the remote, trolling for tragedy. The national pastime. A kid in a well, a bomb at an embassy, a hurricane battering a coastline, the drenched reporters still managing to do disaster play-by-play in their stentorian voices. Whatever did we do-we social pariahs, we shut-ins-without all-news, all-the-time. I havenicknamed myself: the CNN mistress. When I tell my lover this, he laughs with a flicker of guilty commiseration, but he doesn't say anything, no "I'm sorry"s, and I don't say anything. Never ever. There are rules and we follow them. It is the only way to survive in this clandestine nest. And we have survived, six years and counting. I am forty-one. The math is easy. I have been a mistress right through the waning of my fertility. The joke is on me.I go to the kitchen to get a glass of wine. It's only 6:43. Too early to eat. There's a long night ahead, but I've made it almost all the way through the weekend. That's an achievement. I've counted. Five years, 52 weekends, a total of 260 Sunday nights like this one. Sitting back down in my tastefully muted living room (the occasional maroon pillow, yellow sunflower, blue vase to give that little dash of color), I glance at the TV, hoping for just one of those distracting dramas somewhere on the planet, but alas, no, just more pompous pundits giving their inside-the-beltway spiels. I am, as usual, cradling the telephone, but jump anyway when it rings in my lap. A computer voice offering a line of credit. Damn, damn. He will call when he has a chance. Always has, always will. Always will, always has. He will, won't he? I wander toward the bedroom, thinking I might try one of my videos, but am drawn to the bathroom window, which has the best view in the apartment. I spend a lot of time here, standing on the toilet, craning out the small window above it. This is my perch, my view of the city. It is wet-warm after the afternoon rain and smells good. I love New York at night. It is still so strange, so dazzling to my Southern California eyes, even though I've been here now for nearly nine years. On a rooftop nearby, people in fancy clothes are moving about, like pretend figures on a stage. The sky is navy with streaks of black, and lights are coming on in faraway squares in tall buildings. Bling, bling. I'm home, I'm here-the anonymous urban greeting. I never tire of watching this nighttime ritual. Many nights, different seasons, swaddled sometimes against the winter cold, muffler around my ears, my head propped on mittened hands, or summer-sweaty in bra and underpants (my lover, Michael, surprising me one night, tiptoeing into the apartment-must have sensed I was in there, he knows my habits-coming up behind me: "Don't move," he said). It is now October. Autumn. Pretty words both, but freighted with elegy. Daylight saving ending this weekend. I dread it. Slash-nighttime pressing down earlier and earlier, cocktail hour dropping perilously into the late afternoon, especially if you work at home as I do. The cold imminent. The clanking of the radiator. I swear I can hear it already. Clank, clank, clank.
But it's the phone ringing in my hand.
"Baby, it's me."
He is whispering into the phone. I can hear people talking in the background. I whisper back, "You okay?"
"So far," he says. Then, laughing, "Why are you whispering?"
"Don't know," I say, smiling. "I guess 'cause you are."
"Shit," he says, "here comes somebody. Call you back."
And he is gone again. On their rooftop the partygoers are now carrying plates of food. Candles have been lighted and everything looks very flickery and festive. Some of the women have thrown on brightly colored shawls-make that pashminas. I strain to see more closely, even though hanging on the back of the bathroom door is a pair of binoculars that Michael gave me four Christmases ago and which I never use.
"I don't want to see anybody," I said. "I just want to imagine them."
"You're weird," he said, laughing. He takes no umbrage at spurned gifts, not that there have been many of either-spurnings or gifts. We don't do much of that. I can't, so he doesn't. "I'll take them," he said about the binoculars, "and give them to one of the kids."
But he has forgotten them and they still hang around the door, clattering when I shut it. Things left. I can count them on one hand, even six years later: two pairs of old sweatpants, a sweatshirt with Notre Dame on it, a pair of concertedly unchic and scratched sunglasses (no sleek shades for my aging lover), and a few CDs, including his guaranteed favorite tear-tugger, Dylan Thomas reading his own poetry. Irish whiskey in hand, my Irish lover (might be obvious given the above items), will shuffle the floor in his socks, reciting along in a stage whisper.
The phone rings again.
"Hi," I say, assuming it's him. I feel someone there, but there is no answer. Then a click. Damn it again. Come on Michael. Come on, come on, come on. Find a minute, find a closet, go to the bathroom, elude them. I'm here waiting. When he does call, I will be funny and receptive as I always am. I don't rebuke or cajole or whine or talk dirty in case there is someone around; he is easy-to-blush, despite his age and been-around-the-block aura. There are rules, the discipline of the mistress. These romances (I hate the word relationships) don't tolerate much drama, contrary to popular myth. Marriages can be full of that, pushes and pulls, tears and recriminations, and they endure because of the legal bonds and the children and the shared history and the who-wants-to-divide-up-the-spoils sentiment. But in this netherworld where we mistresses live, there must be delicacy. A few too many scenes and the thing just, poof, blows up, goes away. He goes away. This, after all, is the place of refuge, the hiding place from the real world. Make it too real and whammo, you're out of the game. We are invisible, we mistresses of long standing, shadows-and what we know and what the wives know, what we, in fact, collude in, we two women, is to tiptoe around each other's existence, rarely discussing each other with our shared male, scared to tip him one way or the other. Toward her, toward me. Home or out. We collude in sharing him. We manage our jealousies. We practice denial. She has to; she has to know about me-not me me, necessarily, but some me, some younger woman he is seeing-younger because it only makes sense that I-or whoever-would be younger, since he and she are the same age, sixty-one. High school sweethearts. Tethered to the bone. Catholic. Irish Catholic. Of course.
I don't think about him with her (talk about denial): family parties, vacations, sex. Do they still do it, how often, how well? I don't ask him because I only half want to know and because I also know he will try to josh me out of the question in that lopsided smile, chin-thrusting way he has or lie, and we are already living a lie, and if you're living this lie you don't want to court others because it hurts too much. That's another irony: These hidden romances don't tolerate many lies. If he starts lying too much, and you know it-and you will know it, because you are exquisitely attuned to his moods; you cannot help it; you cannot allow yourself the wifely blindness or you will be blindsided and left with nothing-it just means he's losing interest and about to move on, or that you, with whatever is left of your mistressy pride, will have to do that first: Move on.
One thing I do know about her is that she is still attractive, in a generationally earlier beauty parlor way. I have seen a picture of her only once; I wish I hadn't because I have to block the face sometimes on nights when he is not with me, sometimes on nights when he is, and my denial mechanism isn't in top working order, and I get hazy with too much wine and too much longing and then guilt (the death trap of the mistress) and then self-pity (the real death trap of the mistress) and then optimism (the death trap of all death traps, the thought that, yes, he will up and leave her, won't he; he has to, because look what we've got, look what we are). But I always manage to get it under control before going too far, before tumbling into acrimony-or auto-acrimony-and causing real ripples. You have to be realistic here-part of the discipline. Realistic enough to know that since we are living at a time of the frisky, we-still-deserve-ours, sexual entitlement touted by the ever-growing number of magazines for the aging female (I know, I read them, I write for them; sixty's the new forty, they all declaim. Whoopee!), that they probably still have sex. I bet they do. I can't bear to think about it.
Certainly not tonight in particular. That's because tonight, sitting here alone again, waiting for him to call back again, I know he is not at one of his kids' for one of their usual Sunday suppers, nor in a crisis confab with the mayor-for whom he works. That's how I met him, covering the mayor for the few seconds I worked for a Long Island newspaper. There I was, still shiny and relatively new to the city, sitting in a press conference, he standing to the side of the podium. As everything broke up he came down toward me, a little rumply, chin forward. "New?" he said. "Very," I said, feeling shy and flirted with, and I hadn't felt either, shy or flirted with, in a long time. Nobody in my crowd flirts much, maybe in the whole generation. A little circling around, some drinks, some smiles, and there you are in condom-land, in bed with someone you've just met and haven't even flirted with. Right away this was different. Michael was. Older, different training. Now he is in the hospital being prepped for surgery, tomorrow, seven A.M. sharp. First time for this. Though a little heavy, a little too fond of whiskey, and disdainful of gyms ("Who the hell needs a gym," he says to me, "when you've got the streets of New York?"), he is to all outward appearances (and inward, according to his doctor) a reasonably healthy, Lipitor-taking American male. Has been. Now the shot over the bow. The first surgery. If he makes it through, which he is expected to do, barring unforeseen complications (but isn't that, I say to Michael, precisely what life is: unforeseen complications; us, for example), there will be days of recuperation while his family flutters around him, plumping his pillows, bringing him soup, measuring his intake of fluids (and outgo, those little bedpans with the measuring marks inside, looking perversely culinary; I remember them from my father). I am enjoined from that. Once he had a terrible flu while his wife was away-his kids are grown and married and have kids of their own-and he was mine all mine to nurse. He crawled into my apartment like an animal to its den, curling up in the bedroom with a febrile moan. It was so sweet, so unexpected, so new, the chance to nurse-to undress him, not for sex, but for caretaking. I took off his shoes and socks, his pants and shirt, and tucked him into my big bed-which takes up the whole bedroom-and then sailed forth into the city, giddy in my new ministering angel incarnation, to pick up the necessities: cough syrup and throat lozenges and dry-up pills. It was spring, one of those luminous New York spring days when everything is beginning anew. People unwrapped from the winter, in shirtsleeves, the sun teasing their newly exposed flesh, reborn daffodils poking up around trees, everything suddenly leafy and green, the slightest breeze. I walked so happily to the drugstore, not my local, because they know me there, but farther-Michael was asleep, I had time; better just for him to stay out cold, or out hot-away to one on the corner of Lex and Fifty-second so I could say to the pharmacist, with barely camouflaged delight, "Oh, my husband is so sick" and she could say, "Awful to be sick on such a beautiful day" and, after a moment, "Got your hands full, I'm sure." We smiled at each other, sharing the commiserative, eye-rolling tut-tuts about men being such babies, our men, about all the tending involved. With elixirs in hand, I stopped at the market and got a chicken and some leeks and carrots to make soup (what mistress worth her salt wouldn't make chicken soup from scratch; it isn't all about sex) and then, strolling, sun on my own bare arms, just smiling, smiling, till I got nervous it was all a dream and he wouldn't be there, or that his flu had flown and he after it, just a note, all better, bye-bye, call you later, or worse, that it had become pneumonia and he had died right there in my bed (then what; what would I do, right then, not to mention forever after?) and I started almost cantering-a half-walk half-run, and up the elevator (violating my rule to always walk the five flights; indeed, who needs a gym?) bolting in and finding him in his fevered fetal curl. I sat for a moment on the end of the bed, studying him. He is not handsome, not in any orthodox way. He was very flushed, his graying curls (they still have a little copper in them) damp and matted against his forehead, smallish eyes, biggish nose, uneven mouth, the upper lip thicker on one side than the other. I made soup in my tiny kitchen with the window open, hearing the city sounds, chopping leeks and carrots, toying with having a small glass of wine, until he called and I went to him. I plumped the pillows (my turn, my turn) and held his heavy head while he sipped juice and took his Tylenol and then, throwing back the covers, gave him a cool rubdown with a cold cloth and a little Vicks (my hands smelling like mentholated onions) and he groaned, achy with fever and-oh no, oh yes-incipient pleasure. "You're impossible," I said, gently pulling the covers back up over him, leaning to plant a sisterly peck on his demi-erection through the sheets. I lied; it is about sex. "Go back to sleep; I'll wake you for soup." I tiptoed out. My aging, aching trophy was in my bed. I was so happy that day.
Now you see what I really do these weekends. I reminisce. I play back every detail of our time together, like running a video through an internal VCR. And wait for the phone. My friends sometimes call, but they have stopped trying to pry me out, stopped trying to fix me up. But I have never said a confirming word about Michael to anyone. Not one person. Not once. That's the number-one cardinal rule and you have to play by the rules. Have to keep your mouth closed, your lips sealed, your bliss under wraps. That's why dinner parties are dangerous. You go, you might even flirt with a stranger because it's safe, a little intoxicated teasing, and then you will say his name, not this flirtee, but the lover's name, dropping it, just to hear it-that's what Michael always says-to make him manifest there in the room with you for just a minute, and someone will notice-another woman, a friend, and she will press you for details, for a last name. That's the guy that works for the mayor, right? I've seen his picture in the paper. She will call the next day and restart the interrogation. Oh, no, this is the way of ruination. You just never know when a gal pal might metamorphose into a gossiping snitch. So you become increasingly careful, suspicious, isolated. I did. I have. And the dirty little secret is that it suits me. Just fine.
(Continues...)
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