When It Happens to You (16 page)

“Why would she write such a thing to you?” Greta demanded. “Is she crazy? Has something happened between you? Are you in love with her?”

It was this last question that he was able to answer honestly. No, he didn't love her. Of course he didn't. He clung to this small shred of sincerity while he tried to hold Greta close to him, grasping for her with the desperation of a condemned man who knows that he has little chance for a stay of execution.

 

But by the time they arrived at the therapist's office, in that moment when Phillip sank into the oversized club chair, he was so tired of his fear of being caught, so tired from the nights without sleep and the exhaustion of living multiple lives, he felt in that moment that to lose Greta would be preferable to continuing the grueling, fearful deception that had gradually and brutally overtaken his life.

“I don't know what to say,” he said, covering his face with his hands.

Greta sat across from him, rigid. Her jaw was set and she looked as though she were ready to spring at him with some supernatural power, as though she were a comic book character from the volumes he had devoured as a teen. But she remained silent, attempting to hold in her emotions, Phillip supposed, out of deference to the therapist, a kindly-looking older woman with short gray hair.

“Just tell the truth, Phillip,” the woman said in a voice that sounded slightly Southern in origin.

“Oh God, Oh God, Oh God . . .” he moaned, rocking back and forth.

He looked up at the fear and sadness in Greta's face. The rigidity in her jaw started to fail and she began to tremble.

“Go on,” the therapist urged like a mantra. “Tell the truth, Phillip.”

He glanced anxiously at the Buddha statues and orchids strewn about the office. There was a crushing silence in the room, briefly interrupted by the percussive sound of a truck backing up in the alleyway. Then more silence.

“I'm so sorry, Greta,” he finally said.

“So it's true?” she whispered. “You and Theresa?”

He nodded faintly, and wiped the wetness off his face with the back of his sleeve. He wasn't sure if he was crying or perspiring or both. The therapist stood and handed him a tissue box.

“What's true, exactly?” Greta said. Her voice sounded very small, as though issuing from a great distance. “Was it just—”

“All of it. Everything. I'm sorry.”

Greta nodded. The color had drained from her face. Her eyes were glassy and out of focus, her mouth slightly open. She looked like someone whose house was burning down in front of her, deciding what possessions to take with her.

“Stay here with me, both of you. Just breathe for a moment,” the therapist said, and took deep, illustrative breaths, urging the two of them to do the same.

Phillip watched Greta clutching at her stomach. He got down on his knees in front of her.

“I'm so sorry. Greta, believe me when I tell you, I'm so sorry. I'll never do anything like this again.” He took her right hand in his. She stared at his hand and fingered his wedding ring, turning it around with her own index finger.

“Did you keep this on when you did it?”

He looked at the therapist, confused, unsure of what to say, how to answer. The therapist nodded her head to continue.

“I've never taken this off,” he said to Greta. “Not in eighteen years. Never.”

Greta nodded, her lip curling upward—it was the faintest snarl of contempt, the first of its kind he had ever seen from her.

“Please go away. Please just get away from me,” she groaned.

“Greta . . .”

“Now!” Her voice came out like a strangled roar.

“Hold on, Greta,” the therapist said. “It's okay. You're okay. Stay with us.”

Phillip quickly moved back to his chair and looked to the therapist for direction. She folded her hands in her lap and nudged her Plexiglas chair a little closer to them.

“What else does Greta need to know?” she said. “Were there others?”

Phillip hesitated. Greta stared at him, unblinking.

“The truth comes out eventually,” the therapist said. “It always does.”

She let the weight of this hang in the air for a moment before continuing.

“And if there is ever a chance of repairing what has been broken between you two, your wife needs to have the truth in its entirety.”

“I don't think that's possible,” he said.

“The truth?” she said, “Or repairing what is broken.”

“Both,” he said.

“You both deserve the truth,” the woman said. “Both of you.” She turned to Greta, who faintly shrugged her shoulders in the affirmative.

And so Phillip began to confess the extent of his betrayal. The women in conferences, the interns, the one-night stands. Once he began, he found that he couldn't stop. He confessed to crimes he had committed before he had ever even known Greta. Crystal in the back pantry. Leaving Tammy's house and going straight to Marlene's while Tammy called his home repeatedly in tears. The pass he made at Marlene's older sister, Michelle, when Marlene was setting up the Dungeons & Dragons game in their basement. Each confession made him more delirious. He started confessing things that he wasn't even sure happened. The caramel gap-toothed waitress, the redheaded mother at Charlotte's school. Had something happened with her? Or had he merely noticed her with the intention of flirting later? It all became a toxic muddle of fact and fiction, and he was no more able to stop confessing than a bulimic teenager could withstand the call of purification following a slumber party. With each and every mea culpa, he caught sight of his wife recoiling, drifting further and further away from him, until he almost imagined that he could see the essence of her floating away. By the time he had finished, breathless and heaving, he was left with the distinct impression that although she hadn't moved from the seat directly facing him, she was gone. She had slipped away, like the last sliver of sun below the horizon before the sky darkens.

He had lost her.

 

Every route that Phillip chose to take leading back to his office was snarled with traffic. He veered off the freeway, thinking somehow it might be better, but gridlock soon greeted him there, too. Only three o'clock in the afternoon and the cars were bumping up against each other with the impatience and burgeoning panic that Los Angeles rush hour inspired. Where was everyone going? Phillip looked over at the cars idling beside him. In a blue Jetta, a woman put on makeup in her rearview mirror while talking to herself. Behind her, a heavyset man blew a gust of smoke out of his beat-up Ford Explorer, before his tattooed arm extended out the window and he flicked away a cigarette. On the other side of Phillip, a teenage girl inched forward in her Honda Accord while texting. He watched her heavily lipsticked mouth form the words
Are you fucking kidding me?
Absorbed in her reply, she failed to drive forward until the cacophony of honks startled her, and glancing up, she aggressively accelerated, rear-ending the green Mercedes less than a car length in front of her. Phillip pounded on his steering wheel and U-turned out of the lane before the imminent pileup the accident would surely cause.

He managed to get back onto the freeway in good time and was relieved to find that the traffic was much milder on this section. As he weaved his way in and out of the cars, a text from Heather arrived on his phone:
ARE YOU CLOSE?
He looked up at the signs spanning the five lanes of traffic to tell her his location. That was when he realized that he was on the 405 going north instead of south. He looked over at the standstill of traffic in the other direction, switched off his phone, and just kept driving.

 

The Parris family restaurant was located in the San Fernando Valley, nestled between a Payless shoe store and a hardware store in foreclosure. After Phillip's parents died unexpectedly in the same month ten years earlier, Phillip's brother, Tony, and his wife, Suzanne, made the decision to take over the restaurant rather than see it close. It had been in the family for three generations, and though Phillip had refused to believe he had any sentimental attachment to the place, now as he sped north away from his office and all of his adult responsibilities, he realized that he was driving toward it—the restaurant, his brother, and all that remained of his boyhood.

He parked on the street and put a couple of quarters in the meter. The restaurant was empty after the lunch rush, if there was even a lunch rush these days. A bearded man drank a glass of water in the corner, absorbed in a newspaper. Probably a homeless man, Phillip figured, but his parents had had a rule about them when he was younger.

“As long as they are polite, don't smell too much of drink, and aren't taking tables from paying customers, they are welcome here.”

If they looked to be starving, Phillip's father would feed them, but only after the paying customers left and on the condition that they agreed to perform a menial task—washing dishes, taking out the trash. Usually they did; if they didn't, they were turned away.

“Everybody needs to work for something” his father insisted. “If you only take charity, it makes you die inside.” It was a phrase often repeated to his two sons when they were young. Phillip remembered admiring it when he was little and then, as a teenager, rolling his eyes and dismissing it as nothing more than one of the many prosaic platitudes beloved by his father. By the time Phillip reached adulthood—which, according to Greta, had happened only recently if at all—Phillip was back to respecting his father more than any other man he had known. Phillip had struggled to find a way to tell his father this, but after working his entire life, and just before retirement, his father suffered a stroke while driving their mother home from the eye doctor. The car careened into a tree on the side of the street that held the wooden swing he and his brother had played on as children. His father died instantly. His mother spent three and a half weeks in the ICU before her heart gave out.

In the other corner of the restaurant, a young man sat writing in an open spiral notebook, with a stack of schoolbooks in front of him. It took Phillip a moment to register that this boy was his nephew, whom he hadn't seen in years.

“Anthony?”

The boy looked up from his studies. There was a similar delay as he seemed to struggle to place Phillip's face. Then, abruptly, he grinned and stood up.

“Uncle Phillip,” he said, shaking his hand with a surprisingly strong grip.

“Look at you!” Phillip pulled him into an embrace and then let go as he felt the muscles in his nephew contract. Phillip remembered how awkward he felt at Anthony's age, being hugged by relatives.

“You look good, Anthony. What are you, seventeen now?”

“Sixteen. Seventeen in July.”

“Right, the fifth? Same as your grandma's, isn't it?”

Anthony nodded, smiling. He went to sit down, then seemed to remember his manners, and stood back up, leaning against the table.

“Dad's in back. You want me to go get him?”

“No, I'll go. Stay and finish your homework, or whatever it is you're doing.”

“Okay. Good to see you.”

Phillip squeezed the boy's shoulder, then walked toward the back of the restaurant in search of his brother. A teenage girl in a white T-shirt and black skirt stopped him on the way into the kitchen.

“Can I help you, sir?” She had an eyebrow piercing, and when she spoke, Phillip could see the stud on her tongue.

Anthony called out from the corner table, “He's my uncle, Dawn. He's going to talk to Dad.”

Dawn stepped aside and waved to the back. “Oh, sorry,” she said. She took the pencil from behind her ear and twisted it back into her hair. Glancing over at the man nursing his water, she walked over to Anthony's table and sat down across from him.

 

The bones of the restaurant were the same, but some steps had been taken to upgrade a little. The earth-tone paisley wallpaper his mother had picked out had been replaced by a more contemporary abstract design, and the wood floors were stripped a shade or two lighter. Admiring the changes, Phillip walked behind the counter and through the kitchen, where a Hispanic man and woman in hairnets were prepping vegetables and washing dishes. They glanced up at Phillip, nonplussed, and went back to what they were doing.

“Is Tony back here?” he asked.

The young man gestured toward the pantry.

A moment later, Phillip's brother emerged from the pantry carrying a large sack of flour over his shoulder. His dark hair had gone completely salt-and-pepper, like their father's, and it took Phillip a moment to contain the riot of emotion he felt looking at this unexpected combination of father and brother. “Tony.” He exhaled, almost inaudibly, and his brother glanced up at Phillip. The lines in his face deepened as a broad smile creased his face. The smile erupted into a wheezy ex-smoker's laugh, which he broke off abruptly when he caught sight of the anguish of his brother's expression. He dropped the flour and took hold of his brother in his arms.

Phillip felt his throat tighten and constrict.

“Felipe,” he heard his brother say, pronouncing the name the way their
abuelita
did and, later, his father on the rare occasion that he drank.

Phillip collapsed into his brother, his only living immediate family, whom he hadn't seen in more than three years. The kitchen help scattered in different directions as the strangled sobs echoed throughout the stainless-steel kitchen. At the moment, it didn't matter to Phillip that he hadn't cried in front of his brother, or any other man, since he was seven years old. He just allowed himself the release and comfort of his brother's embrace, repeating the words, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” without knowing for certain for what or to whom he was apologizing.

 

“I can open up one of our bottles of wine, if you'd want that instead,” Tony said.