Tim had always rolled his eyes and agreed. But that was before.
While Carolyn could perform doggy-style sex enthusiastically – an image I would now be forced to carry with me to my grave – could she make the dinners Tim liked to have ready for him when he got home? Buy groceries and keep the house stocked so that she could toss together a dinner for two, six, or eight clients or friends at a moment’s notice? Make the bed every morning or take care of the house so that an unexpected visit by anyone would never embarrass us? Do any of the hundreds of things I did daily, none of which Tim even necessarily specifically noticed, yet all of which kept his life running smoothly, prettily and competently?
All while also maintaining my own career as one half of the practice?
I didn’t think so.
I didn’t even attempt to process what had happened. What would be the point? It was unprocessable. It was impossible, and yet it had happened. I simply sat there on the plush sofa, surrounded by all the things Tim and I had gathered over the course of our seven years together, two years of dating and five years of marriage. All the detritus of more than half a decade. The by-products of intimacy. I threw out all the sheets they’d touched and put that mattress on the kerb. I sat. I waited.
But Tim did not call. Carolyn did. And not with the expected grovelling, prostrate, tearing of hair and rending of garments sort of apology either.
‘I am so sorry,’ she said. Her voice did not sound rough with shame. Or grief. Or horror at her own behaviour and the pain she’d caused. She sounded the way she always did. ‘I really am. I never meant to hurt you.’
I was unable to speak. I wasn’t sure why I’d picked up in the first place. Anger and betrayal and something else that hollowed out my lungs and sent acid coursing through my belly stole my breath, my words. I could only stand there at the island in my kitchen, frozen into place with my cell phone clamped to my ear and the refrigerator door swung wide open and abandoned behind me, unable to process what I was hearing.
‘I love him,’ Carolyn said in that same perfectly normal
way of hers. But it was impossible. Absurd. And yet she said it as if in her world there was a cresting soundtrack and all the right kind of lighting, making her the heroine of this moment instead of its villainess. ‘And he loves me. I’m sorry. I really am.’
But she wasn’t sorry enough to stop. She wasn’t sorry enough to give me back my husband, who, she told me, was staying in one of the bed and breakfasts in town.
With her.
She wasn’t, I recognized, sorry at all. Not in any meaningful way. Not really.
It could be worse
, I told myself bitterly as, over the next few weeks, I was forced to come to terms with the fact that Tim appeared to be remaining in that bed and breakfast.
With her
. A step up for Carolyn, who had been riding out her unemployment at my parents’ house. A step down for Tim, I told myself.
It had to be
.
I attempted to work from home because I didn’t want to go into the office and face him. Or, worse, the judgemental Annette. Her inability to ever treat me with one iota of the deference she’d slathered all over Tim struck me now, in retrospect, as a clue I should have heeded. There I’d been, furious that she wasn’t respecting me as she should, and meanwhile, had she known the whole time that Tim was sneaking around behind my back? Was that why she’d steadfastly refused to do what I wanted her to do? Had she assumed that I simply didn’t matter enough – to anyone?
Because that was certainly how it felt. Even from my parents.
‘Oh, Sarah,’ my mother said in that sad way of hers that always made me feel as if she thought she was the victim, no matter what the issue was. She patted my hand as it lay between us on her kitchen table, the house free of Carolyn’s presence, but only because she was currently tucked up in bed
with my husband
, and sighed heavily. ‘We don’t condone what Carolyn did, of course, but we don’t want to get involved. We don’t want to be in the middle.’
I didn’t understand how there was a middle of this to be in, when it seemed like there was a very clear side to choose here – that this was one of the very few situations in life that was not grey at all. But I had never had any success figuring out what went on in my mother’s head before, so the fact that I couldn’t now? Not a huge surprise.
I told myself it didn’t even hurt.
And
it could be worse
, I reminded myself when Tim sat me down for a ‘friendly chat’ about six weeks after he’d moved out, and long after I’d figured out how to navigate going in and out of the office without having to see him – i.e., monitoring his calendar to see when he was in court or out with clients. It was strange to see him again, after so much had happened. It was stranger to note that our ‘friendly chat’ had a clear agenda. It was all about what was fair and what we both knew to be true about our marriage (except I hadn’t known anything, a point he glossed over) and the best way for everyone (by which, it
became clear, he meant himself and Carolyn) to get what they wanted out of ‘this unpleasantness’.
I slouched there in the deceptively uncomfortable faux-leather Starbucks armchair, wearing my post-sister-in-bed-with-husband uniform of ancient grey sweats and a navy-blue zip-up hooded sweatshirt, breathing in the competing scents of burnt coffee beans and warm milk, while staring at my husband, the man I had chosen to
spend the rest of my life with
, forced to contemplate the possibility that he was a complete and total stranger to me. Or, alternatively, a zombie in Carolyn’s evil thrall.
I preferred the latter explanation, if I was honest.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I felt as if I choked on the words, but my voice sounded normal enough, if a little unhealthily high. Also, I wasn’t sorry. I cleared my throat. ‘Did you just call sleeping with my sister “this unpleasantness”?’ I laughed slightly. It felt like a saw and sounded worse. ‘Because I can think of other words.’
Tim sighed. I knew every line of his boyishly handsome face, every single expression he was capable of producing, and I knew that one, too. I assured myself I was reading him wrong. Because if anyone had the right to look
resigned
, it was not him.
‘Don’t make this more difficult than it has to be, Sarah,’ he said. Gently, but with that undercurrent of exasperation to which he was not in the least bit entitled. Then he smiled. ‘We’re better than that, aren’t we?’
I was ashamed of how much I clung to that, how much
my heart swelled and my breath caught. His use of the word
we
.
Long after we’d separated with an awkward almost-hug in the chilly parking lot, long after I had returned to the empty house on the hill and got back to the important work of hollowing out the perfect position on the sofa cushions to hold me as I brooded and shoved things in my mouth without thought, I still turned it over and over in my head.
We
. A word that did not, could not, had never, included Carolyn.
We
.
Tim did not call or stop by to reiterate any of the things I felt sure were lurking there in that one, meaningful syllable.
We
. But I still thought it was only a matter of time before the impossibility of living with Carolyn – because he’d told me that, too, that the two of them were now
living together
in that damned bed and breakfast, right there in the centre of town where every single person we knew would be sure to see them – became clear to him. How could it not? No one could live with Carolyn. In the sixth grade I had moved down into the largely unfinished basement of our parents’ house so that I would no longer have to share the upstairs bedroom with her mood swings and melodramatic demands. College and post-college roommates, boyfriends, even that insufferable hippy she’d been engaged to briefly during her strange period in Portland, Oregon – everyone agreed that Carolyn was too selfish, too immature, too
adolescent
to live with.
I held onto that when Tim asked to meet again, about
two months after he’d moved out, to discuss the quick, no-fault divorce he thought we should get. As if it were something we could just pick up downtown together from one of the specialty shops, as easy as that.
‘It seems to me that there is a fault,’ I said after Tim presented me with all the paperwork and explained that this was the best way out of what he called
the situation
. As if our marriage were a preposterous guy from New Jersey, all steroids and terrible hair, soon to be discarded and forgotten. He sat there as if his own faux-leather Starbucks chair were perfectly comfortable, and I had the near-uncontainable urge to throw my not-nearly-foamy-enough pumpkin spice Halloween latte at his head. ‘Your fault, in fact.’
I actually thought it was Carolyn’s fault, but I also thought that there was a lot of grovelling Tim could do – like, any – before I let him know I understood that. I had elaborate fantasies of his extended apologies, all of which I would eventually, graciously, accept with varying degrees of longsuffering
goodness
, and all of which involved him on his knees. Or prostrate before me on a public street. In tears, of course.
Begging me to take him back—
‘Do we really want to drag all this out?’ Tim asked, interrupting my favourite fantasy, which featured him somewhat bruised and battered and writhing on his stomach in the driveway. In the rain.
He smiled in that way that made his blue eyes dance and his dimples show. He reached over and put his hand
over mine, right there in front of half of the town, and I thawed a little bit, like a fool.
See?
I wanted to shout at all the pricked ears and averted eyes that surrounded us.
See? We are still a
we!
We are!
‘Are we
those
people?’ he asked softly.
And I still wanted to impress him. I still wanted to show him that
I
wasn’t the one who was unreasonable, who made impossible demands.
I
could never be
those people
, whoever they were. Just like I could never be the notoriously demanding, high-maintenance, haughty and sister-betraying Carolyn.
A week or so after that, Tim and I met to discuss the
shape
our divorce would take. It could be so much worse, I told myself, as we sat there awkwardly in a more secluded mid-range restaurant this time, a gesture that I found suspicious at best, as Tim was not the sort to think of such things. I was the partner in our marriage responsible for
gestures
. I could feel the controlling, deceitful hand of Carolyn hovering over everything, and told myself
that
was why I couldn’t bring myself to so much as pick at the warm bread the waiter had delivered to the table in a big, fragrant basket.
We would save ourselves the trauma of a long, drawn-out, agonizing divorce proceeding, Tim said. I wouldn’t fight him for anything, he said,
right, Sarah
? Because
we
weren’t like that.
We
were reasonable, logical people, and a big battle over hurt feelings – well, who did that serve?
We
could share everything. The law practice too, of course!
Why should our careers take a hit simply because our marriage hadn’t worked out as we’d planned?
We, we, we
. I felt
noble
. I nodded along, earnestly. He’d cheated on me,
in my own bed, with my sister
, and yet I sat at the tiny table too close to the busy kitchen and felt
gracious. I’ll show him how reasonable and logical I am
, I thought fiercely, as if our divorce were a competition and I could actually win it.
And I was sure that when this insanity with Carolyn died down, Tim would wake up from this spell he was under and remember just how easy I’d made all of this. He might even
thank
me, I thought smugly. I drove back to our dark, empty home with visions of Tim’s thanks dancing in my head, like bloated pre-Thanksgiving sugarplums.
Shockingly, the thanks didn’t come.
But … it could be worse, right? Luckily, everyone I knew was appalled. Scandalized and horrified. They told me so at the supermarket, at stoplights. The joys of living in a mid-sized village in the Hudson Valley were that everyone I met in the course of my day knew the whole of my business. More to the point, they also knew all there was to know about Carolyn. And there was so much to know. Carolyn’s entire history of shocking, self-obsessed, her-needs-above-all-else behaviour, was laid out and dissected in detail over the produce section in the grocery or in the shampoo aisle at the drugstore, and, everyone agreed, no one could possibly trust that Tim now that he’d proved himself to be such a terrible judge of character …
Until Carolyn announced their wedding plans, to take place in roughly six months, which was, I couldn’t help but note, just about how long it took to get a no-contest divorce in the state of New York.
The minute the divorce goes through
, is what she meant when she waxed rhapsodic about a June wedding. I wondered if there was fancy wording for that sentiment that she could include on the invitations.
If so, I felt certain that Carolyn would find it. And use it, with as much shame as she’d exhibited thus far: none.
‘I know that somewhere deep inside of you – even if it’s buried right now – you’ll understand that we just want to be happy,’ Carolyn confided to my voicemail, as I had stopped taking her calls after that first, horrible one. ‘And we want you to be happy too, Sarah. We really do.’
Which was when I started to think hard about plagues.
AIDS
, I thought fiercely as I considered the laborious process of making a new life for myself when I’d had no hand in dismantling the old one.
Bubonic plague. Tuberculosis
. I thought about insects. Locusts and bird flu.
Ebola
, I chanted to myself as I navigated a home town, a courthouse, a gauntlet of clients filled with all those knowing, pitying stares.
Mad cow. SARS. Necrotizing fasciitis
.
Because it was getting harder and harder to convince myself that there was anything at all worse than this.