When It Happens to You (6 page)

Phillip bobbed his knee up and down while he listened with mounting impatience to the caller.

“Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” He nudged Marina with the tip of his foot and mouthed the words “
I'm sorry.
” She waved her hand at him and deliberately turned to watch the kids playing in the distance to give him space. The children had taken a break from the monkey bars and now sat facing each other, their legs in a V, toes touching, talking. She could tell that Oliver was telling a story, and she tried to decipher its subject from the grand hand gestures. Charlotte threw her head back and the high tinkling laughter traveled all the way to the bench where their parents sat.

“God, it's nice to hear her laugh,” Phillip said. He had finished the phone call and slipped his BlackBerry into the breast pocket of his broadcloth button-down.

“I think Ollie could make anyone laugh. He could make the Taliban laugh,” she said.

Phillip smiled and ran a hand through his closely cropped blond hair. “Christ, it's hot. I'd like to round up all those global-warming naysayers shoulder to shoulder and just watch them bake.”

Marina laughed. “Well, that would be my entire family.”

Phillip raised an eyebrow with interest. “No kidding.”

“Yup. No such thing as global warming. Evolution is questionable. And, of course, homosexuals are all going to hell.”

“And where exactly did you come from?” Phillip asked.

“Orange County,” she said. “From the virginal loins of Joyce Pennock née Hartcourt. I think my parents did it precisely three times in their lives, and each time she got knocked up.”

“Brothers? Sisters?” Phillip asked.

“One of each,” Marina said. “And boy-oh-boy do they toe the party line. Ollie and I are the black sheep of the family. Literally.” She laced her fingers above her head and stretched. She noticed his eyes flit across her ribcage and then just as quickly dart away. “Holidays are loads of fun at the Pennocks'.”

“All families are horrible, aren't they?” Phillip said. “I mean, I don't think I've ever met anyone who just straight-out likes their family.”

“That's depressing,” Marina said.

“I shouldn't say that. I mean, mine really wasn't so bad.”

She was about to ask for details when he took the vibrating phone out of his pocket and looked at it. She glanced over at the screen and saw the face of Charlotte's mother.

“Go ahead,” she told him.

Phillip jumped up and walked a few feet away from their bench. Marina had only met Phillip's estranged wife once in passing at their children's school, when they found themselves standing alone in the school parking lot several minutes too early for pickup. Marina introduced herself as the mother of Oliver, Charlotte's friend. The woman nodded and smiled, but Marina had the strange feeling that she was looking through her, as though Marina were invisible. They exchanged e-mail addresses and the vague promise of setting up a playdate. This was at the beginning of the school year. Marina sent her two e-mails that remained unanswered. A few months later she and Phillip got to know each other, and she was relieved that a friendship with her was never forged.

Marina watched Phillip pace while he talked on the phone. His back curved suddenly as though a weight had been placed on his shoulders, pitching him forward. With the phone up to his ear and his other hand wrapped around his forehead, he pressed his thumb and index finger into the pressure points of his temples. “He's a disaster,” Marina thought. “Toxic,” she could hear Una say. “Unavailable,” said Merle. “Damaged,” said Trudie. As her gaggle of married girlfriends listed the litany of his many obvious failings, Marina knew that given the chance, she would surely go to bed with him anyway.

“Okay, okay! I hear what you're saying. And I'm sorry,” she heard Phillip say. He walked back to the bench and began gathering Charlotte's things. “I'm just in the park with her now. I can meet you in a half hour.” Phillip's face was red. “If we hurry, maybe fifteen, okay? I'm sorry. I . . .” He stood for a moment with the phone in his hand. It was clear to Marina that she had hung up.

“Everything okay?” she asked him, knowing it wasn't.

He grabbed Charlotte's tote and his messenger bag.

“I'm sorry. I—”

“Hey. You don't need to say you're sorry to me.”

“It's a habit,” he said.

She reached out and grabbed his wrist. She could feel his pulse race against her fingers.

“Well, you need to stop it,” she said, still holding on to him.

Phillip looked at her, clearly surprised by the touch. He snapped his head around—to find his daughter, she figured—and she dropped his hand, embarrassed by her forwardness.

“Let me be the person you don't apologize to. That's all I mean.”

Phillip reached out and turned up the brim of her sunhat. She looked straight into his eyes. She had never seen that color on a man. They reminded her of an old Edwardian ring that she had inherited from her grandmother—what was the stone? Tourmaline? Aquamarine? She noticed a birthmark next to his left eye and wanted to kiss it.

“Thank you,” he said.

When he turned away from her, she felt herself exhale, not realizing that she had been holding her breath.

“Where are they?” Phillip said.

Hearing the panic in his voice, she ran toward the playground, scanning the monkey bars and jungle gyms.

“Ollie!” she screamed. Frightened children looked up at her. She could feel her heart beating wildly and her stomach drop as though she were descending in the elevator in a skyscraper. Several kids scattered, running into the protective embraces of their multicultural nannies. She saw Phillip sprint in the direction of the stone bathroom fixtures on the other side of the playground, along the edge of the parking lot. Just as he reached the building, she saw the two kids run out, holding hands, with their fingers interlaced.

Even from a distance, Marina could tell that the children had swapped clothing. Charlotte wore the gender-nonspecific tunic that she had purchased for Oliver in a store specializing in beachwear, while Oliver was dressed in Charlotte's floral sundress and her pink patent-leather sandals, his hair unbraided and bunched into two ponytails. By the time Marina reached the children, Charlotte was crying, frightened by Phillip's anger. He was on his knees holding her while she whimpered.

Marina looked down at her son, who watched the father and daughter with an uncertain expression.

“Ollie . . .”

“We wanted to play opposites,” he told his mother quietly. “It's opposite day.”

“It's okay, honey,” she said, running her hand up and down his neck.

“It's
not
okay,” Phillip said. “You don't just run off without telling anyone.”

In Phillip's eyes she imagined that she could see the flicker of blame.

“He's right, Ollie,” Marina said. “You both scared us.”

Charlotte kept her head buried in her father's shoulder. “It was Ollie's idea,” she heard her say in between sobs.

Oliver grabbed on to his mother's leg, blinking back tears himself. “It's opposite day!” he said again.

Marina remembered the things that they had left on the park bench. “Hey,” she said to Phillip, “Do you want me to take them into the bathroom and change them, and I'll meet you at your car?”

Phillip stood up, carrying Charlotte in his arms.

“Can we just do the exchange later? She'll kill me if I'm not there in the next few minutes.”

Charlotte popped her head up. “Who's going to kill you, Daddy?”

“No one,” he said. He ran off in the direction of the car. Marina took her son's hand, and together they walked back to the bench in rare silence.

 

“Are you sure he was blaming you? Did he actually
say
it was your fault?”

Marina perched on the kitchen island in Trudie's restored Craftsman and watched her friend assemble a complicated pasta dish. Oliver played a game on Marina's iPhone while lying on the living room couch; Trudie's two girls were already asleep in their bedroom.

“No,” Marina said. “He didn't say it was my fault. He didn't say it was anyone's fault. But it was the way he looked at . . .” Marina didn't say Oliver's name, but she pointed in the direction of the living room.

Trudie nodded. “Well, anytime kids take off their clothes . . .” She didn't finish her sentence.

Marina chewed on an olive and spit the pit in an ashtray with the words
THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING
written on it.

“Please, Trudie. They're six years old. What are they going to see?” She grabbed another olive. “And I think we all know that Ollie is not interested in Charlotte's body. He wanted her clothes. He wanted the sundress with the flowers on it and the pink sandals. There's no desire there. Or if there is desire, it's the desire to look like her.”

Trudie poured the pasta into a baking dish and refilled Marina's glass.

“Have you thought of taking him somewhere?” Trudie asked. “Like a therapist or something?”

“To do what? What's a therapist going to do? No one is going to convince him that he's a boy. And I can't
make
him a girl. He already resents me for it. It's like he thinks it's my fault that I gave birth to him and made him a boy.”

She craned her head around to see if Oliver was eavesdropping. He seemed entirely absorbed in his game.

“I don't know what to do with him.” She shook her head and drank deeply from her wineglass. “I really don't.”

Trudie set the timer on the oven and poured herself a glass of pinot noir.

“I wouldn't discount therapy. You know Ellie was seeing someone.”

“No, I didn't know that,” Marina said. “Why?”

“Night terrors. She'd always been a perfect sleeper. We ‘Ferberized' her just like we did Alice, and then out of the blue she started screaming at night. Sometimes two or three times a night.”

“Jesus!” Marina said. “I had no idea.”

Trudie shrugged. “Ron doesn't want me to talk about it. I tell him it's silly, I mean it's the twenty-first century. Therapy is hardly taboo. But he says he doesn't want to ‘pathologize' our child.”

“Sure, sure,” Marina said. “I can understand that.” She didn't understand. But then again, she didn't really understand what her friend even saw in her husband. Ron was a drip, Marina thought. But unlike most drips who at least manage to be innocuous in their drippiness, Ron asserted himself by thrusting his opinions on his gentle and conflict-avoidant wife.

“It's been months now, and Ellie's sleeping through the night just fine again. Personally I think she was a miracle worker. I was at the end of my rope.”

“Mommy?” Marina looked over at Oliver who stood in the doorway holding her cell phone out to her. “Charlotte's daddy is on the phone. He wants to talk to you.”

 

The smell of early blooming jasmine and honeysuckle lingered in the air as Marina sat on her porch with her laptop, distracting herself with work while she waited for Phillip. He had asked to see her, and she had told him to stop by after she put Oliver to bed. Picking up on her nervous energy, her son dragged out his bedtime even more than usual, begging for more pages to be read, more water to drink, and more trips to the bathroom after lights-out. Marina surreptitiously texted Phillip three times asking him to come later. After the last time, when he didn't reply for ten minutes, she was afraid that he would cancel and found herself unjustly furious with her son.

“Are you still mad at me, Mommy?” he asked. “I won't do it again.”

Marina took a deep breath and grabbed him in a tight embrace. “No, my love. I'm not mad. I just have work that I need to get to, that's all.” She felt guilty for omitting the fact that she was expecting Phillip, but until she knew what the visit was about, she wasn't comfortable mentioning it. Oliver was extremely possessive, never having had to share Marina with anyone. She hadn't even spent the night with anyone since before he was born.

Perched on the teak bench, she tried to concentrate on the catalog layout she was designing. A small soy-candle company had hired Marina to glamorize its image—to take it out of the crunchy patchouli-scented air of its origins and into something trendier and upmarket; but frustratingly the company kept asking her to go back and change the layouts every time she tried anything new. She was resizing the candles against different-colored backgrounds and fussing with the fonts when Phillip's Volvo pulled up.

“Hey,” he said as he walked toward her. He carried a six-pack of Heineken in his hand.

Marina's heart leaped into her throat, and all of the boldness and brashness that she relied upon with most everyone deserted her.

“Hi, hi,” she said shyly. “I didn't know this was bring-your-own-beer.” She snapped her laptop shut and tucked it under her arm. Phillip leaned back against a post and looked down at her through eyes half-closed.

“Long day,” he said.

“Yeah.” She wasn't sure if he was referring to his day or hers. She got up and took the six-pack from him. He seemed taller than she remembered, though most of the time they spent together they were seated in a playground. “Let me open one of these for you,” she said. “Unless you want to do it with your teeth and impress me.”

“Oh, I would hope I could find other ways to impress you,” he said with a smile.

Marina turned away from him and headed into the house. His comment set her mind into a flurry of interpretation.
What did it mean? Did he mean . . . Was he just bantering? Are we flirting?
She could feel her pulse quickening, and as much as she wanted to be near him, there was something about the proximity that felt sudden and painful. Like sticking your toes in ice-cold water before submerging yourself entirely. There is always that deliciously uncomfortable bit you need to get through.