Love and Other Natural Disasters (3 page)

I repeated those phrases and even
tried some new ones, calculated to cause agony. Like, Jon's
in love with
her, he doesn't care about you. He's just been pretending all these years. He's
a liar, and a cheat.
It was like punching myself in the face after
Novocain. I was trying to feel something, but I couldn't.

I heard the front door open; then I
felt Jon's weight beside me on the couch. I kept my eyes closed.

"Eve," he said softly.

"Don't talk to me," I
said, but without feeling.

"You're right, we shouldn't
talk anymore tonight. I'm going to a hotel."

I said nothing.

"Please know that I'm sorry,
and that I love you. Please know that."

I didn't open my eyes.

Did I believe Jon loved me? Yes.
But the value of his love—our love—changed that night. And what do you do with
devalued love?

I had a certain story about my life
with Jon, a story I liked, and it didn't fit anymore. Worse, maybe it never had.

I met Jon when I was twenty and he
was twenty-one. It was the beginning of my junior year at Berkeley, and his
senior. I'd been unhappy, and then I wasn't. Four years later, we were married.
Then we had Jacob. We bought a house. We got pregnant again.

Those were all the facts I had
left.

But here's the story I used to tell
myself:

During my senior year of college, I
worked part-time as a receptionist in a doctor's office. The waiting room had a
large tank, well-stocked with colorful, exotic fish. But my favorites were the
plainest. Long, thin, and dull silver, they circled each other constantly. One
would remain stationary while the other orbited around him/her; then they'd
reverse. All day long, they'd circle. Jon joked that maybe they had OCD; I
thought it was love. Compulsive, no doubt. But a love that was about purpose
and constancy. Those were two committed fish. They never circled any other.

One day, I came in and one was
floating, and I saw the difference between stationary and motionless. The other
fish was still circling, and there was a frantic quality to it that I'd never
seen before. I knew I couldn't just leave the dead fish in the tank (it would
be a bad subliminal message to send in a doctor's office, for one thing), but I
hated to think of the other all alone in a sea of prettier, flashier fish.
Finally I got the net, and did what I had to do. For the rest of the day, the
remaining silver fish tried to circle other fish. I don't know if it was their
apathy or that he/she just figured out that some beings are irreplaceable, but
by the next morning, circling had become spinning. Then it became nothing.
Within a few days, the second silver fish was dead.

I didn't have grandparents that
loved each other for fifty years, and after one died, the other's heart gave
out. The fish were it for me. Corny, macabre, or just plain strange as it may
seem, they were my love story. The day I flushed the second fish, I went home
and cried, and Jon held me and not one thing about him said, "But they
were,
fish."
I was twenty-one, and I wanted to circle him for the rest of my
life.

CHAPTER THREE

I applied carpet deodorizer four
times, waiting the requisite ten minutes before each vacuuming, and still, it
was like my Thanksgiving dinner was sitting there winking at me. I'd thought
motherhood had sucked all the squeamishness out of me, but I was wrong. As they
say, the learning never stops.

I wished I weren't alone, that it
wasn't just me and the white noise of the vacuum. If I got really hard up for
company, I could always go wake my mother. She was in the office/guest room,
adrift on sleeping pills with her ears plugged. Earlier, after Jon left for the
hotel, I told her the truth, that he was having an affair. She started
wandering around in such an obvious state of bereavement that I said she should
take her pill early. I didn't mean for it to come out so harshly, and I hated
that she just nodded and followed instructions. Sometimes she seemed like a
puppy that had been kicked too often; she was always ready to roll over and
show her belly.

That was a mean thought. Why have
mean thoughts about my mother? This wasn't her fault, unless her tendency to
pick rotten men was genetic and my birthright had finally caught up with me.

But it didn't make sense. In all
these years, I'd never had occasion to doubt Jon's love and fidelity. It was
like suddenly finding out you've been living in someone else's marriage—someone
else's bad marriage. I mean, these sorts of things don't happen in good
marriages, do they?

We had a good marriage.
Have
a
good marriage, I corrected myself. So maybe he could spend all that time
e-mailing and talking to Laney and have it be friendship, nothing more. She
could be some lonely, needy woman he felt sorry for; she could just be a habit
or a distraction, a way to get through a boring day at the office. It was
possible. He was Jacob's father. I was carrying his second child. It had to be
possible.

I could check his e-mail and find
out.

At first it was a rogue thought,
immediately and easily dismissed. But it just kept bobbing to the surface. It
wouldn't be denied. I'd never contemplated something like this before, but how
else could I get the truth? At the very least, Jon had lied by omission for a
year, and right to my face this very day. Besides, I opened Jon's mail all the
time. We shared a bank account. We (usually) shared a bed. I could read the
e-mail, he'd be exonerated, and we'd laugh about this later.
Oh, remember
the Thanksgiving when I vomited all over my shoes and then broke into your
e-mail?
Hilarity would surely ensue.

I turned off the vacuum and padded
into the guest room. Fortunately, there was some light seeping in from the
hallway, enough to guide me to the desk. I didn't touch the overhead light, for
fear of waking my mother. She was lying on the futon, her back to me, and she
didn't stir. I silently thanked the makers of Ambien as I settled myself at the
desk and booted up the computer. It seemed an interminable wait. My heart was
beating madly. It knew before I did that this was one of those moments from
which there's no turning back. Whatever I read, I couldn't un-read. I couldn't
un-know.

A few clicks of the mouse, and I
was staring at the login screen for Jon's e-mail. I was pretty sure I knew the
password. Jon used the same password for everything. He was trusting that way.

For a long minute, I sat there,
battling my conscience; then I typed in "redwood53." Obligingly, his
in-box filled the screen. Along with various spam for penis enlargement and wet
Russian girls and cum-
ing
that would go on for days,
there was a message from Laney in bold, meaning he hadn't read it yet.
"Happy Thanksgiving!" was its subject heading.

J,

I don't even think I remembered to
tell you happy Thanksgiving when we talked, I was so busy blubbering! So here
you are. Also, I wanted to apologize for pulling you away from your family. I
know it was selfish of me to call, but I felt like yours was the only voice I
wanted to hear. © I didn't mean to get you in trouble with Eve. Talk soon?

L

Exclamation points and emoticons. J
to her L. She was nauseating, but there was nothing that screamed "more
than a friend" about it. The fact that his voice was the only one she
wanted to hear could just mean that she was a big loser and had no other
friends. I liked that idea.

I looked at the folders on the
left, and saw that there was one named Laney. I couldn't help noticing that
there was no folder called Eve. Being more interested in what he'd written to
her than what she'd written to him, I zeroed in on the Sent folder. But first,
I covered my tracks, marking the Thanksgiving e-mail once again as unread, in
bold.

The Sent folder went back only
about six months, probably because it was so overstuffed with missives to
Laney. He must have written a million gigabytes to her. Or was it megabytes?
He'd said the e-mails were daily, but sometimes there were two or three over
the course of a day. I tried not to think about the instant-messaging
possibilities.

Steeling myself, I opened the
earliest. To the untrained eye, it seemed innocuous enough—he was giving her
advice about whether to fly out for a friend's wedding, telling a cute anecdote
about work—but what shattered me was that I could hear him. as if in
voice-over. The warm conversational tone was so similar to the e-mails he used
to send me that if I hadn't known better, I would have thought they were mine.
Jon didn't woo with overt flirting or romance; he wooed with charming asides
and attention to detail, with responsiveness and empathy. You felt understood
by him; you thought you knew him completely.

Every day, he was wooing Laney with
the stream-ill-consciousness details of his past and his present (in one
e-mail, he started out riffing about his penchant for overly sentimental sports
movies, then went into a self-deprecating description of his one glorious season
as a high-school shortstop, and ended on his excitement over Jacob starting
T-ball next year). Laney was a fixture in his life. He was her J, and she was
his
L,
and the affection he felt for her couldn't have been clearer.

And where was I? Pretty much nowhere.
After reading ten e-mails full of stylized ramblings, I started obsessively
skimming message after message, trying to find myself. Over the course of
months, I got four mentions. It seemed like a sure sign that Laney wasn't just
a friend; she was the other woman. I couldn't think of any other explanation
for my conspicuous absence.

Then there was what he chose to
tell her about me:

Eve reacted just like I said she
would, like I was hoping she wouldn't. I know she gets really stressed out,
with it being early in the pregnancy, but sometimes I just feel like I'm
walking on eggshells around her.

I looked at the date and tried to
figure out what could have happened the night before. It wasn't the day of an
ultrasound, not that I could recall. Just an ordinary day, except that whatever
I'd done, it was bad enough to tell Laney about. Not bad enough to tell me,
though. Walking on eggshells? I'd never heard him use that phrase. Since I
wasn't featured in any nearby e-mails, he could only have made his prediction
on the phone to Laney, which meant he'd bashed me on the phone to the other
woman.

Blinking back tears, I clicked on
the next e-mail, and the next. Twenty or so later, I found this:

Eve and my mother bad-mouth each
other a lot. When Eve says something about my mother, I want to defend my
mother. When my mother says something about Eve, I want to defend Eve. How hard
can it be to just get along?

Okay, that was nothing new. He'd
said that directly to me before; just as he'd chosen to do earlier tonight, I'd
always chosen to take it as rhetorical. Only Laney probably had an answer. She
was probably the type to nod and smile politely even through one of Sylvia's
backhanded compliments. Maybe she wouldn't even notice it was backhanded.

In the next e-mail mention I got,
after talking about Jacob's great personality:

A lot of it's Eve's doing. She's a
really good mom. I know she has
a
temper, but she manages to keep that
away from Jacob.

Talk about your backhanded
compliments. You'd think I spent half my life breaking dishes over Jon's head,
the other half smiling beatifically at Jacob. Laney probably thought I was
schizophrenic.

Was this really how he saw me?

At least when he was describing our
family trip to Disneyland (when he wrote her every day but one), I rated
a
"we,"
as in "We took Jacob on every ride he was tall enough to go on," but
maybe that was just accidental. I mean, he was "we"-
ing
all that week. "Should we do this?"
"Should we go there?" But there was no "Eve."

While I hated that he'd said those
things about me (some being things he never said to me), it was my absence that
hurt the most. So many paragraphs of him discussing his impending second
fatherhood, and I wasn't mentioned in any of them, as if I were an incubator.
He'd just rubbed me out of his life, in order to forge a second, imaginary life
with Laney.

I wanted to stop reading, but I
couldn't. I was a glutton for truth, hungry to know Jon and my marriage. Yet as
I continued reading, it was like I was finding out everything about his life
(sometimes down to his thoughts on dry cleaning) and nothing at all. There were
no grand confessions. I knew the old stories and anecdotes. It wasn't as if Jon
kept important things from me and told them to Laney (eggshells
notwithstanding); Laney was the only important thing he'd neglected to tell me.

Midway through an e-mail that found
him musing about chicken salad sandwiches, I felt an unexpected flash of
sadness at just how boring Jon's life was. He worked in financial services,
he'd been with the same company since college, and he was a fairly typical
suburban husband and father. Even having an affair was typical, when you
thought about it. The unique thing was that his was cyber, not sexual, and that
was getting less unique all the time.