Between Husbands and Friends (13 page)

Max and Chip arrived the next weekend. We met them at the ferry. Max swung Margaret up in his left arm, grabbed me with his right, pulled me to him, and kissed me soundly on my mouth. “I’ve missed you,” he said, his breath warm and stirring against my neck.

Chip lifted his son up onto his shoulders, and perhaps it was because he had to steady the boy by holding on to both legs, or perhaps it was just the way Chip was—reserved—but I noticed that he only leaned forward and pecked Kate chastely and briefly on the lips.

While we’d waited for the ferry to pull in, our children tugging on our hands and wriggling all over like excited puppies, Kate had said to me in a calm, even cavalier tone, as if reminding me to pick up something at the grocery store, “Don’t tell Max about my little fling, okay?”

I didn’t respond. I had to think about that. I told Max
everything.

“I don’t want him to think less of me, Lucy,” Kate continued. “And you know he would.”

It was true. He
would
think less of her. And he might begin to wonder about me. About what it was I was looking for when I danced at the Muse.

“Okay,” I said to Kate. “I promise.”

That was the first time I made a choice between my husband and my best friend.

Margaret’s helping me chop vegetables for tacos. She’s just returned from the Cunninghams’ and all she can talk about is Matthew’s new electric guitar.

“I think we’re ready,” I tell her. “Will you call Jeremy and your dad?”

She knows by now that I don’t mean she should stand in the middle of the room and bellow. Off she goes, while I set glasses of ice water at each place. The ice seems to make my fingers tingle … but now my lips are tingling, too. I take deep breaths. I will not allow another effing panic attack to overwhelm me, not now.

Max enters the kitchen, Jeremy riding on his shoulders. We sit around the table, passing salsa, cheese, tomatoes, and Margaret is still going on about Matthew’s electric guitar.

“So is Matthew giving up piano?” Max asks.

“No. He’s going to do both. Classical piano and electric rock.” Carefully she spoons green peppers onto the tidy layers of her taco. “He’s going to form a band with some other guys. Tony Rondo and Jason Cutler. It’s going to be really cool.”

“Mom,” Jeremy asks, “who’s Jared Falconer?”

Surprised, my first response is to wait for the anxiety attack to knock my breath out of my chest. But nothing happens. Perhaps the heat and spice of the tacos provide sufficient antidote to the cold of panic. I swallow and wipe my mouth. “How do you know about Jared Falconer?”

“He left a message on the machine for you.” Jeremy looks guilty. “I forgot to hit the Save button.” His taco shell shatters before he can fill it and his chin crumples.

I take his broken shell, put a whole one on his plate, and help him delicately spoon in the filling. “That’s all right, honey.”

“Why did Jared Falconer call you?” Max asks.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you.” Jumping up, I find myself spontaneously moving into diversionary tactics. “You know what would taste good with this? A beer. Want one?”

“I’ll take one,” Margaret says.

“Yeah!” Jeremy laughs, exposing a mouth full of food.

“Close your mouth when you chew!” Max, Margaret, and I chorus, laughing with disgust.

I open a beer for myself and one for him, pour them into glasses, set them on the table. “Jared Falconer asked me to join his firm.”

“When did he do this?”

“Um, just a couple of weeks ago. I was going to talk it over with you, but I wanted to think about it first.”

“What kind of firm, Mom?” Margaret asks.

“It’s a prestigious advertising and public relations firm in Boston,” Max says. “Did he talk about salary?”

“Only generally.” I can feel myself blush. I sit down and slug back some beer. “I told him I need some time to think about it. He said I can let him know in September.”

Max says, “So they’re not just filling an empty slot. They want you.”

“I never thought of it that way, but I guess you’re right. They liked the fund-raising I did for the animal shelter.”

“It’s quite a compliment,” Max says.

“That’s true. But it might not be the best thing for me. Commuting to Boston and all. I’d probably have to wear suits. High heels.”

“That would be cool, Mom,” Margaret says.

“What do you think?” I ask Max.

He considers. “It would change your life. Our lives.”

“I know. And I’m very happy with my life just as it is. On the other hand, we’ve got Margaret’s college tuition to plan for.” Jeremy begins to cough.

“It’s all the driving that bothers me. I’ve been so lucky, working at home.” Max rubs Jeremy’s back. “Okay now?”

“Okay, Dad,” Jeremy says.

“We’ve got a lot of time to talk about it,” I say. “Things have a way of coming clear when we’re on Nantucket.”

Later that night, Max sits on Jeremy’s bed, leaning against the headboard. He’s just finished reading
Caleb’s Friend
for the ten thousandth time. Jeremy checked out this book so persistently from the library that I finally ordered a copy for him to have for his very own. He looks at it every night before he goes to sleep.

It’s about a real boy who becomes friends with a mer-boy. They never speak—the mer-boy can’t, and can’t understand words either—but they manage to communicate, to tap into something profound and enduring in the other’s soul. It’s a beautiful book, but melancholy, and I wonder what it means that Jeremy loves it so.

Maybe Jeremy thinks he’s part merman. Certainly he loves the water as if he were. His joy at being in the ocean has strengthened my sense that we are right to keep the Nantucket house. I am an enthusiastic if graceless swimmer, and Margaret has had lessons since she was two years old and likes the water well enough, but Max is a Taurus, a land animal, preferring to keep his feet on land. Or he did, until the first summer that Jeremy toddled, shrieking with glee, into the shallow waves at the Jetties. Jeremy is one of the few children I’ve seen who didn’t cry when he first got his face wet, and when a wave knocked him off his feet, rolling over him so that for a moment he was under water, out of our sight, he came up grinning, blowing water out of his nose, and dancing a little jig of happiness. He could swim well by three; he didn’t need lessons, but looked around him, saw other people, imitated their movements, and set off. Max has become a stronger swimmer, and has even taken lifesaving lessons, just to try to keep up with his son, and I know he’s proud of his new skills, glad to feel more at home in the water. In the winter, Jeremy and Max go off to the high school pool two nights a week and on Saturdays, to keep improving their strokes. Of course this all delights me; it makes our Nantucket house seem even more integral to our life.

Jeremy’s longing to really swim, like the big boys do, out beyond the sandbar. Tonight he looks too small to fight his way across a pool, let alone a harbor. His brown curls glint with gold lights and his nose and cheeks are sunburned from his days at Camp Arbor. He’s lost his right front tooth and all of his teeth look too small, out of scale with his face. His cough has dried up; he is a normal healthy boy, tired after a summer day, and fiercely protective of his secret relationship with the boys in the book.

I’m leaning against the doorframe, looking in at my guys, pleased with what I see. Jeremy will be on the short side like his father, and if he ever gains any weight, he’ll be stocky, too. He has taken up his father’s habit of taking a deep breath and nodding sharply, once, between one matter of attention and focus and another, and as I watch, both father and son inhale and nod. They’ve finished reading. Time to move on.

“All right, son,” Max says. “Time to get some sleep.”

“ ’Night, Daddy,” Jeremy responds, sliding down onto his pillow. His book stays in bed with him.

“Good night, Jere-Bear,” I say, entering the room. Jeremy reaches up his skinny arms for a good night hug.

Max turns on the night-light. We pull the door not quite closed, open enough so he can see the light in the hallway.

Margaret is also in bed, also reading, so deeply engrossed in a gothic mystery that she only offers her cheek for a quick kiss and keeps her eyes on the page. I love this; I feel Max and I have done at least one thing right: We’ve turned our children into addicted readers.

“ ’Night, Magpie,” Max says, kissing her forehead.

“ ’Night, Dad.”

“Don’t read too late,” I warn her, and she nods absently. I could have spoken in Russian and received the same response.

Max is in the study, reading a fax.

“It’s late,” I tell him. “Come to bed.”

“In a minute.”

It’s been two weeks since Stan dropped the bomb about Paul Richardson’s involvement with the CDA Corporation. Max is making an effort to interact with the children, but with me he can’t dissemble quite so easily.

Entering the study, I approach Max and stand behind him. I wrap my arms around his waist and rest my head against his back. I feel the muscles in his shoulders move as he adjusts the pages of the fax.

I have a book waiting, too, a good book. Over the fifteen years of our marriage there have been plenty of nights when I’ve chosen to read a book rather than make love, or even when I’ve resented having to put a book aside because my husband’s hand was on my thigh. We haven’t made love for two weeks, and this is an early warning sign. I can feel Max slipping away from me.

“Do you want to discuss the Jared Falconer thing?”

“Not now.”

“Then do you want to do this …” I move my hands down to his groin.

“Not now,” he grumbles, twitching his shoulder irritably.

“Now,” I say. Standing on tiptoe, I nibble at the skin behind his ear. He has shaved today and his skin is only slightly bristly with evening beard.

“I’ve got to make some notes.”

“You can do that later.”

“Come on, Loose,” Max says, suddenly moving away from the table and away from my touch. “I told you I have work to do.”

This is where I usually give up. It’s at junctures like this that I’ve thought, Oh, fuck it, and walked away. But not tonight. I feel like some kind of mythological heroine, leaning over a well or a cliff, trying to grasp her lover, to haul him back up from his fall into the depths.

“Max. Honey. It’s nine-fifteen. Let’s take the phone off the hook and give ourselves twenty minutes. We haven’t had twenty minutes for quite a while.”

I don’t know about him, but the pitch of my voice is seducing me. My need seduces me. I reach out and put my hand on his wrist. I do love this man. After all these years I am intensely attracted to him. I love the electric bristle of the curly black hair on his arms.

Sighing, he turns and pulls me against his chest. “Lucy, please. Not now.”

“Don’t shut me out,” I say.

“I’m not shutting you out,” he protests gently. “I’ve just got a lot to get done.”

I look up into his eyes. “Max, I’m worried about you. I want you to see someone. I want you to try antidepressants.”

He laughs. “Hey, just because I don’t want to make love one time doesn’t mean I’m depressed.”

“No, but it could be a sign. Added to all the other signs—”

“There
are
no other signs. I’m just tired and overwhelmed with stuff from work. After a week on Nantucket, after this damned humidity drops, I’ll be fine.”

“It’s just so hard to live with you when you’re depressed.”

“I’m not depressed!” Max insists.

“Well,
I
am,” I mutter as I leave the room.

Chip bought a sailboat, a beautiful twenty-foot sloop that sliced gracefully through the water and responded, he told us, with an almost sentient quickness. The second Friday in August, Chip and Max brought the boat to Nantucket from the Cape, and on Saturday we all went sailing. Chip had the best of intentions for all of us, and eventually the children came to love sailing, but that first time out was misery.

It was a blustery day. Margaret and Matthew were energetic, wriggling, goofy five-year-olds, and they hated the rubbery confinement of life jackets. The wind whipped Margaret’s hair into her face and batted the sheets against Matthew’s head. The dazzle of the sun off the water hurt their eyes. They wanted to hang over the sides and dangle their hands in the bubbling water, but Kate and I clutched on to them for dear life, knowing how easily one sudden move of the boat could send a small child into the sea. Sniveling with boredom, the little ones crouched down in the cabin while Kate and I watched them fiercely to be sure they didn’t get clubbed by the boom or tangled in the sheets. And all the time Chip was too happy and busy to notice, and Max was crewing and having a great time himself.

When we got back to shore, Kate and I took the children off to Children’s Beach, where they ran and splashed in the water, releasing their pent-up energy. The late afternoon sun seared our windburned skin, and we were thirsty and hot. We arrived back at the house with two tired, sandy, cranky children, to find Chip and Max reclining in chairs in the backyard.

“What’s for dinner?” Chip called.