The Idea of Him (10 page)

14

Danger Zone

Tommy looked at me like he was measuring me up against the size of his bed. “You and James ever actually hook up or did you just torture yourselves?”

I took a sip and cracked the back of my neck. More late drinkers and people on dates came into the cozy bar so I didn't feel quite so alone with Tommy. “Okay, I'm going to indulge you this once,” I answered, feeling game to open up in a way I rarely did. “Here's the true headline: I don't know if it was because James entered my life in the years before my father died and witnessed the whole damn thing, but despite my feelings for him, I still could never, ever really let him in in that deep, intimate, romantic way. He was a willing player in the game of push and pull. I mean, we went through so much so it's hard to figure out the seesaw of emotions I always have with him, but it was like I always had to preserve something. This deprivation thing that felt safer. You know about that?”

“I understand, but I think I'm the opposite, more of a love addict of sorts,” he answered. “This is going to help your writing, I promise; when was the first hookup? Tell me about the scene when you knew this was your soul mate guy.”

“The summer we were thirteen and fourteen, a group of us were playing Marco Polo, jumping into a lake off a tire rope . . . It was nearly sunset when James rode his bike up, pretending like he was looking to hang out with the guys. But both of us knew he was there to see me, and that thrill caused a new ache in my core. He was much more developed than the rest of the guys. And his dirty blond hair curled all over the place.” Tommy tried to ruffle up his own short hair, but it didn't work. I smiled and bit my lower lip. “To this day, he's the guy who never cares what people think or see, and he's always been pretty gruff and clueless on the emotional front. But there was also a seriousness that attracted me to him.” I glanced up at Tommy's blue eyes. The dim lights of the bar glowed amber. “There was this small swarm of mosquitoes circling his head like a halo. It caught my breath.”

I coughed and swung my legs around to the front panel of the bar as his had touched mine and stayed there for a longer beat than is normal for two people
not on a date
. “At first James treaded water just next to our group, but then he came right over to me and pulled me onto his shoulders to chicken fight with another couple of kids. I kept falling down his back and having to hold on to him piggyback, all wet in my bathing suit, slipping up and down. My newly curvy body filled with so much excitement, it ached.” My blush had turned into a permanent flush.

“Did you let him know somehow?”

“Almost, but my dad showed up, right there to survey my first real intimate and very sexual contact with a guy, yelling at me from the road.” I imitated him: “ ‘Allie! You're late. Your mother's going to kill me if I don't get you in this car right away. It's her party!' He was sweaty and dirty from the docks.”

Tommy asked, “Did he see for sure you slithering on James's back?”

“No question he saw us; I watched him watch us. I suddenly felt naked and ashamed. Weird. When we walked up the bank, Dad grabbed me on one side and had James walk on the other, and he suddenly said to James, ‘You're George Whitman's son. Jesus, you look like him. And his wife, Nancy.' It was a bizarre thing to say. James answered, ‘Yes. They are my parents,' which echoed how weird Dad sounded.”

“What was so weird about it?” Tommy asked, his face looming ever closer to mine.

“I don't know exactly.” When we were a little older, like seventeen, James and I decided that his mom and my dad definitely had an affair, otherwise why were they on the plane so secretly last minute like that? And there were other clues we figured out later, but I wasn't about to add that to my list of confessions to Tommy.

“I do remember my father stiffening at the sight of us with bathing suits half falling off and saying, ‘Don't you kids have towels?' and he looked really uncomfortable. Even after all that happened and all that I would understand many years later, I still remember that detail distinctly:
Don't you kids have towels?
He was always the cool-dude dad. I'd never seen him rattled the way he was just then, trying to cover us up.”

“He knew James was the one. Protecting his little girl, obviously.”

“I guess. Anyway, James threw his bike on the rack in the back of Dad's Jeep and jumped into the back, holding the roll bar. It was so hot outside that our bodies dried off quickly and I felt sticky from the dirt in the lake. As Dad hurtled his Jeep up the rocky path to the road, James instinctively put his hand around my lower hip to make sure I didn't fall. I looked at him, a little shocked that he was touching me, and that he kept his hand there. He whispered deeply into my ear, ‘You okay?' I could only nod; the touch was so intense. ‘Good,' he said, a buzzing sensation by my cheek. ‘Real good.' ”

Tommy was spellbound in front of me. “You wrote this all down, right? I mean, this is in your script? This blush with first love?”

“Not that scene in particular.”

“Well, that's the scene where everything started, right? You falling for someone, your dad's watchful eye, both paternal and Oedipal. Then you lose both of them? This is what it's all about. This is your hero's journey, to get back the love you lost, or find it elsewhere. You have got to write this all down. It's real stuff that works.”

I knew that Tommy was right: my life was all about what began that night. It was that night, under the elms, with a peek of moonlight shining through the maroon maple leaves, that I first understood what love must be like. Something you can't help but feel. Something I would spend decades trying to run from, or desperately searching for in places it didn't exist. And ever since the accident in all that billowing and hateful snow, it'd been a mad dash, groping toward an illusion of intimacy, only to be left empty-handed.

“I think I need to get home,” I said, pulling on my coat. “I want to get writing on this while it's still fresh.”

Tommy buttoned my coat close around my neck and cocked an eyebrow. “You need a ride?”

Before I knew it, I was hanging on to Tommy's hard body as we sped up Eighth Avenue on his beat-up motorcycle. All I could think was,
This is really, really dumb.
He wrapped his fingers in mine at a stoplight near my apartment on West Twenty-Third Street and Tenth Avenue and I tried to free them, but he just clamped on them harder. By the time we pulled up a block away from my building, I was shaking. He took his helmet off and rolled the bike onto its kickstand.

“You can't come up,” I blurted out.

“I wasn't asking to.” He took a step closer to me. “But you could come to my apartment instead.”

“I'm married,” I blurted further.

“No shit,” he answered, his hand on my arm, his head tilting to the left. “We'd have fun. I promise you you'd have a great time.”

“I mean, I'm not in the greatest relationship.”

“What a surprise.” He smiled within inches of my lips.

“But it's not, I mean, I've never . . . this isn't what . . . I just wanted to talk about writing . . . I didn't mean to get this so far down the line and give you the impression you were coming up or that I was going to run to your apartment or was ready in any way to . . .”

“Stop worrying. This isn't about that.”

Tommy cupped my cheek in his large rough hand and kissed me so hard and feverishly that he had to hold the back of my neck with the other hand so I wouldn't crash backward.

15

Spin Cycle

With my head caught in a spin cycle, I quietly slipped into the apartment. That was the only time I'd kissed anyone else since I married Wade.

Of course it was.

I wasn't like Wade. I didn't sample other people or get tempted or drawn into secret situations. When I got into bed at night with him, I would never want to have been with someone else. My nerves couldn't handle it. I think I would blurt it out within twenty seconds that I'd cheated and I was sorry.

Now my nerves had to handle it. Now was different: I told myself that Tommy
was not
retaliation, but that he was put before me just then to help me see things. Of course in a moment of honesty I knew that forbidden kiss was tit for tat on some level. Many things were too blurry just then, so I held fast to my base belief that Tommy's encouragement with my writing was going to lead me somewhere good.

It was well past one
A.M.
Wade and the kids were sprawled in a tangle on the couch with the television still on and Häagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream bar wrappers strewn all around them. The light-headedness that Tommy had kissed into me crashed to a stop as I took in how Wade had managed to trash the apartment in just four hours alone with the kids. As incensed as I was about the mess, the blue light gleaming on their dirty faces told me how much fun they must have had during their sloppy, rules-breaking night without their bad cop.

Always the irrepressible clown around them, always the irresponsible parent taking their side in a ridiculous debate with me over bedtime, unhealthy food, or an inappropriate movie—all this still made me profoundly enamored of Wade and his sloppy, boundless love for our children. How could I not still love him somehow, the father in him who was my partner in making our kids, watching him there with them? While Wade never volunteered for the tough stuff of parenting—narcissists don't take to personal discomfort—he was the best overgrown puppy any child could want around.

It was painfully obvious that Wade was capable of living like this forever, Peter Panning his way through a second childhood alongside Lucy and Blake, and then angling for the next round with our grandchildren. No wonder he'd been so excited each time I turned up pregnant. He was making playmates.

I watched them lying there in a messy clump, six legs intertwined, and felt the heartbreak of the inevitable flow. How was I going to stay with a cheater and how was I going to ever move on when he and I both loved our kids so much?

Even if what Jackie Malone had told me at the bar weren't 100 percent true—that Wade had a finger in a larger scandal—I had a deeper suspicion that she was on to something, maybe even something unsafe.

I lifted up Lucy silently and carried her to her room, letting the boys figure out their own sleeping arrangements should they stir. The entire apartment looked like a herd of rhinos had trampled through it; drawers were opened, the contents of Wade's closet were strewn all over our floor, and his desk and office area were upended. I sighed. It was going to be a long night of restoring order instead of writing. There was no way I could focus on my screenplay, let alone get that perfect Tommy tongue out of my mind, with this level of chaos around me.

After changing my rag-doll daughter into her pajamas, I took her filthy clothes into the laundry room. I gathered an armful of towels, and a toy clattered to the floor. Bending down to snag a little headless Polly Pocket before she caused yet another clogged drain and a $400 visit from the plumber, I saw something behind her missing head. It looked like a matchbook sticking out of the crack between the wall and the dryer. I pulled a small screwdriver from the tool shelf and pried the piece of plastic free.

It was a flash drive, the kind of thing that would have fallen out of a sport coat pocket. The mess in our home that night took on enlarged meaning: Jackie might have been right; Wade had misplaced something that she was trying to find in his jacket in the laundry room. I fondled the flash drive with my fingers and wondered something: Would the flash drive, coupled with my screenplay, be the ticket out of my crazy life and into a completely new chapter where I could leave the ass-kissing of the PR world behind me? One where I concentrated on two things: mothering my children intensely well and writing better than I ever had.

I slipped Wade's secret flash drive into my laptop as if it were my getaway car. I scanned a dizzying twelve-page Excel sheet with code words at the top of the columns reading Project Black, Project Red, Project Green, and so on. I couldn't decipher it. I decided I should copy the material quickly on both my laptop and a second flash drive and return the original flash drive to the safekeeping of my jeans pocket. With Wade still asleep in his study area curled up with Blake, I tiptoed back to the kitchen for tea and returned to our bedroom, door slightly ajar. I puttered around, trying to understand what on earth color-named projects had to do with something illegal.

I opened my computer to distract myself and to try to write a scene about that day by the lake that Tommy had sucked out of me. Kiss or no forbidden kiss, Tommy was there to help me, damnit. From the first day of class, he and I had had so much to say to each other. The easy intimacy we shared might help me purge painful and poignant scenes from deep inside. He was a convenient crutch, a logical and harmless crutch, one designed to help me write and find the truth. I didn't need to fear him.

I also didn't need to kiss him back like it was our final good-bye on a sinking ocean liner.

 

WITH A CANDLE
sparkling nearby and my computer screen blank, I was thankful when my phone rang and I recognized James's number. Of all people to reach me now. My mind ricocheted from Tommy to the man across the Atlantic. James would call at all hours in Paris, or maybe he was now calling surreptitiously while his Clementine was sleeping. In any case, I was more unhinged than I'd realized and I was grateful James would help me think clearly.

“Hey, need to talk, perfect timing,” I said, letting out a huge breath, hoping to expel some madness and heartbreak along with it.

After a moment of silence, we both spoke at once.

“How's Paris?” And “How's that husband of yours?”

“In general Paris is fine” and “Wade's fine. Same as always.”

I paused to let him speak next. “Well, that doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement,” James finally said.

“You know. It's okay,” I murmured. “Maybe we could talk a little now and I'll walk you through the latest. It's not good. In fact, it's bad.”

“Why is it bad?”

“I don't know. If you want me to simplify it, it's like he isn't who I thought he was.”

“Maybe he was always like this, and you didn't see it or
listen to me clearly when I tried to explain it to you before you got hitched,
” he nudged.

I laughed a little to show him I heard his point. “I prefer to think he changed.”

“Well, you could come visit Paris this summer and we could spend some real time on this.”

“How would Clementine feel about that?” I asked with a hint of bitterness I just couldn't help.

“She'd be fine; she's all into her stuff at UNESCO, you know, helping students all over,” James said, giving no hint of movement on their front. “You could bring the kids. We could show them around. You and I could have dinner and talk. Clem's great with kids.”

“Maybe,” I said, cooling on the idea of a Paris get-together. “Maybe not such a good idea.” We were at a silent impasse, into which the shriek of an ambulance simultaneously howled outside my window and on the phone.

“Holy shit,” I said, almost dropping the phone. “You're not in Paris.”

“No, I'm not,” he answered. “Busted.”

“Were you calling to tell me?” My cheeks were on fire, but whether it was lingering anger or the thrill he was here now I had no clue. “You didn't even mention you were coming to New York.”

“Jesus, relax, Allie. You launched right into your crisis with the man I told you would put you in constant crisis if you married him. I'm crashing at Jerry's for a bit. Down the block.”

“You're what?” I thought I'd heard wrong.

James laughed at my girlish excitement he knew too well. “I only landed in New York about three hours ago; my plane was very late from Europe, and I feel bad I didn't warn you earlier I was coming. I took a nap, a little shower. I'm leaving at dawn to go up to Connecticut because my dad's sick for the hundredth time. I was planning to call you from there. I should be in and out of the city though, if you want to do something for real.”

Yes, I wanted to do something for real.

Call it man whiplash, call it tit for tat, call it longing from forever way back, but there were a lot of things I wanted to do right then and there with James.