The Mermaid of Brooklyn (39 page)

Which was why my hair moved in a nonexistent breeze as if we were chatting underwater. Which was why I could have sworn I was emitting a seaweedy odor, why I found myself inching toward him like a large hunk of driftwood.

“Jenny,” said Sam. “You—you’re. I, I—”

I laughed. “I was just going to say that!”

“I think about you all the time.”

“I think about you, too,” I said. My insides performed an undignified happy dance.

“I wish—it were some other way.” He was having difficulty, looking at his hands, flushing beneath his stubble. I was gripped with a confused, cannibalistic urge to unearth his eyeballs from his head and swallow them whole. Also, it sounded like someone was
squeaking in the other room.
Oh, no, no. No, babies, you sleep, damn you!

“Look, I’m not trying to make you do anything you don’t want to do. I just thought that it would be nice to hang out and chat without all the kids around for once,” I said idiotically. “I like you, you know? We’re friends, aren’t we? It’s so hard around here—there are so many assholes.” The squeaking was making me tense, occupying a growing sector of my consciousness.

He smiled. He was just too nice, he really was. The way his eyes crinkled when he smiled—
I could love that forever,
I thought,
I know I could. I would never get tired of that.
“I don’t want to chat,” he said.

“Yeah, me, neither,” I admitted.

He leaned forward, or maybe I did. We both did. We all did. The rusalka, she pushed my chest out. The heat between Sam and me was palpable. I hadn’t been so worked up about a kiss since Dennis Hellman at sleepover camp reached his friendship-braceleted hand toward mine, his smile semi-precious with orthodontia. I felt as though I might pass out, as if mashing my lips against this other person’s lips could change my life, could heal every hurt I’d ever had.
Yesyesyesyes
said my brain, or the rusalka, or someone.
Yesyesyeskissme.

I wish I could report that here I turned away, or he did. That one of us said,
No, I’m sorry, I really couldn’t. The whole marriage thing, you know.
Or
This won’t really solve anything for either of us, now, will it?
I don’t know what his excuse was. All I know is that kissing felt too delicious not to, like falling asleep when you shouldn’t but you’re so exhausted that it takes over, a bandit in your body. And also, my mermaid, she wanted it. We kissed. It was an excruciating pleasure. We kissed for a hundred years. We did.

And Sam! Cute Dad! Who would have thought? His hands were
everywhere, on my breasts (
Don’t leak, don’t leak,
I pleaded), up my skirt, squeezing my thighs so urgently that I found a map of ardent bruises in the morning. My legs wound around his waist, my hands tangled in his hair. This was not the kind of thing I had ever done in my whole entire life. It definitely wasn’t me inching off my underwear, whispering into his ear, teasing him, no, begging him, to fuck me. No, plain old Jenny had always made men wait, had been reserved in bed, had turned the lights off every time, and more recently, mom Jenny reserved her body for her babies, for gestating and nursing and comforting, transformed her carnal self into just another friendly mammal. This rusalka, I am telling you, she was crazy. Was this how you seduced a man? It felt like such a violence.

Yet I didn’t want to pull away, I wanted to be pressed against him in that instant forever. He smelled so good, like plain soap and coffee, and his body was surprisingly firm beneath his soft gray T-shirt. He paused for a moment, rested his chin on the top of my head. My face was rubbed raw from his stubble. We sat there for a long time, kissing and stopping and then kissing again and running our hands over each other’s bodies and every once in a while looking into each other’s eyes and laughing, because we were just so happy, and so nervous, and so disbelieving. After years with the same man, it was tremblingly novel to have this whole new terrain, not to know the exact thing he liked in order to get it all done in the most efficient way, to have everything ahead of us. All I could think already was
Goddammit. This could be really good. We really could have a lot of fun together.

Suddenly, he pulled away and studied me with those large dark eyes. He brushed a curl out of my face with one finger. Something about this action undid me completely.
Fuck it! Let’s go! Don’t you want to know what it’s like, at least? Don’t you think this could really be something?
It could, that was the whole problem. There was this
ease between us, a web connecting our brains. It was weird how it happened. Sometimes I’d be riding the subway or ordering coffee somewhere and there it would be, a small shared moment with someone, a tiny flicker of recognition—of what? of something—and I’d know that were our lives to run parallel a few instants longer, I could be in love with this stranger, that we shared—what was it?—
something
. I’d always felt this about Sam, and now here he was and here I was. “Sam, Sam, Sam,” I whispered into his chest. I wanted him. Maybe that’s all it really was. I just wanted him. And I wanted him to want me. And I wanted, I allowed a tiny part of myself to admit, Harry to know that I wanted someone and that someone wanted me, that he couldn’t just leave me alone and expect me to wait. I know. I know. I know it wasn’t a nice thing to do. But what can I say? We did it.

Afterward, like everyone everywhere, we lay together, breathing, sweating, my head on his chest, his hands in my hair. Sleeping with someone else’s husband, I now know, is very much like jumping off a bridge. The ineluctable urge, the incomparable pleasure of relenting, the moment of bliss, pure as a raindrop. And then, post-release, the immediate, dizzying, eternal regret.
What. Oh. What. Have. I. Done.
From the rusalka, that bitch: silence.

“This is good,” Cute Dad whispered into my hair. “We deserve a little bit of happiness.” Which distracted me. Worse, it popped the bubble, transformed the shimmery surface into just soap for a depressing instant before it disappeared completely. We were two people again. It was awful.

I squirmed away, sat up, began to dress.
We deserve a little bit of happiness.
What the hell was that? We were always saying things like this to ourselves and each other, as if our everyday lives were
wrought with struggle. So our spouses were tired and cranky, so our families expected a lot from us. So what? I’d found that people who said things like “I have to start thinking about myself” tended to be people who were very good at thinking about themselves. And Sam and I were always saying things to each other like “We have to think about ourselves.” Did we really? Was there anything so valuable in thinking about ourselves more than we already did, which was almost constantly? But it was tempting to agree.
It happens every day. People do it every day. Why not you? It will be so good. It could be so good. Let’s do this again tomorrow and the next day and the next. Let’s have fun.

He pulled me close again, his hands in my hair. Was this really how easy it was? I told him we wanted each other, and then we did? Up close his eyelashes were darker and curlier and prettier than I had ever known. I heard one of children stir. Apartment dwellers really couldn’t have trysts. Maybe there was a way to find out how it was done. Maybe you could you dial 311—“Hi, I need a place to meet a lover? 11215 zip code, preferably?” Maybe it was an in-demand service I could start if the sewing thing ever dried up. I accidentally thought of Harry, of all the times we’d done it on that couch because one kid or another was sleeping in our bed. You couldn’t ever have a moment alone, could you?

“Jenny, Jenny,” Sam said, nuzzling my neck, holding my face in his ursine hands. The nuzzling tickled, so I giggled, which he took as encouragement, pressing closer. I again pictured Harry’s face—“Sam? As in Sam and Juliet? You’re kidding me.”

I stood up suddenly. “You should go.” Looking into Sam’s eyes unhinged my brain, so I looked away, toward the windows, where the orangey undark of the street reflected us back to us. I should have at least thought to close the shades. I was no good at this. “We probably shouldn’t have done that.”

“But I really wanted to,” he said, like a boy.

“I know.” My chest felt as if it had been dipped in concrete and dropped into the ocean, my heart disposed of by gangsters it had done wrong. “Me, too.”

Sam straightened his ponytail. His ponytail! How could I have been so absurd? It was difficult to believe a few moments earlier, he’d been inside of me, unmetaphorically, that the dampness leaking out of me was— Oh God. I pressed at my face as if I could mold myself back into myself. Sam was saying, “You’re right. No, you’re right. Of course you are. I’m—I’m so sorry. We don’t—”

“I mean, really. We— You have such a nice family. Such a nice—wife.” It was difficult to say the word, like a foreign idiom I hadn’t mastered.

“I know, I know.” He shook his head. “Let’s not talk about this now. Just—don’t say it. That was— I want to see you again.” It was a silly thing to say. Like it or not, we would of course see each other again, probably every day. And now we’d have to pretend we hadn’t, you know. Fucked. Fuck.

His body looked different to me, as if I could see his skeleton. He didn’t look at me as he dressed, patted for his keys like any disheveled dad.

Well, mermaid? Was it good for you? Are you happy now?

You know I don’t like when you call me that.

Excuse me, but I just gave you what you’ve been wanting all summer, at great personal risk. I’ve probably just ruined our lives. Or at least our marriages. All for you.

For me? Don’t make me laugh! You know who that was for. And by the way, you’re welcome.

I see. I see how it is. Hey, guess what, actually. There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.

And what’s that, you fool?

You have to go.

I have to WHAT?

“You know, this probably isn’t the time or place, but there is something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Sam said. He was at the door, a giant in the jamb. It had been all of fifteen minutes, and already the sex was starting to feel like a highly improbable, misremembered dream. “Ah, we’re moving. She found an apartment in Astoria. Well, get this—Nell found it and said she knew it was perfect for us.”

After all I’ve done for you. You were nothing. Nothing. You were dying! I saved your life!

“Astoria! Jesus! That’s so far!”

Don’t you ignore me! You think I’ll just dissolve? What, you think you can pick and choose? When you want me, when you don’t?

“I know. I know,” he moaned.

Nell. Nell! It took all my concentration to block out the rusalka’s muttering, to think things through. Why did Nell care enough to take him away? I’d have imagined she’d be just as happy to watch us destroy ourselves while she sipped an iced green tea and oozed superiority, which was her specialty, after all. But there was something else unsettling in all this, something difficult to define and even more difficult to locate, like a hair coiled in an eye socket. The forces of the city, the code of the town, pushing him away from me, to protect him, or me, or somebody, or everybody. Too late, as it turned out.

“I won’t tell anyone,” I said, not looking at him. “I promise. Listen, Sam. It’s not you. It’s perfectly obvious to everyone, I’m afraid, that I’m crazy about you. Too crazy about you. I’ve wanted you forever. And that was—great, really. It really was amazing. But I think— This wouldn’t fix anything. You know? I think I need fixing. And it needs to be me doing the fixing. Not you. Not anyone
else.” That sounded good, I thought, like something from a smart article. I hoped I could remember it.

He looked at me as if I were speaking another language. Maybe I was. I felt so damn sorry for him, I thought I might cry, but I also was really, really tired of crying. I realize how that sounds. It wasn’t that he’d, like, gotten a taste of my
Kama Sutra
–style moves and now would have no more, boo-hoo for him. Hardly. It was more that I was sorry I’d dragged him into the whole mess, that I’d, I don’t know. Seduced him. Seduced him in order to prove a point to myself. Now he would always have to know in his heart that he was a man who would cheat on his wife, that, given the chance, he was that kind of guy. He wasn’t, I really believed he wasn’t, until I made him.

Harry would have leaned in and kissed me, hard, would have taken my hand and said he would give me time to think but we would see each other again. Or no, he would have pressed me to the couch and taken me again right then and there. But Sam, poor Sam. He was too fucking nice. It was exactly what I liked about him, but it was annoying, a little, too.
Don’t listen to me!
I wanted to say.
Take me in your arms, show me how it could be, make me love you.
But he was reasonable. He was adult. He was going to let my family sort out our own particular mess, and he was going to the gym now, to responsibly establish his alibi. Poor Juliet. Poor all of us.