The Most Fun We Ever Had (24 page)

They were both equally, aggressively sanguine about the imperfections of their union, which meant that someone, somewhere, someday probably had to accept Grace.

—

G
illian called when Liza was in her office, reading a belligerently boring paper on cognitive ergonomics. She answered the phone, still struggling to correct a faulty sentence.

“Is now a good time?” Gillian asked. “I just got your blood work back.”

Liza set down the jaunty green pen that she used to grade her students’ most offensive papers and sat back in her chair. “Absolutely. Now’s fine.”

“All clear,” Gillian said cheerfully. “Everything looks very good. You’ve got a healthy baby on the way. Would you like to know the sex?” It was supposed to be such an exuberant question,
baby boy or baby girl.

“No,” she said. If she knew the sex she would know more specifically who she was letting down. Because that quickening in her belly was supposed to make her feel swelled with love and wonder and fulfillment but instead made her want to cry; because sometimes when she felt that cosmic movement she pushed back at it, insistently. Because a baby meant Ryan, forever. “I’d like to find out with my partner.” The bulk of the lie nearly took her breath away.

“Are you okay?” Gillian asked. “You sound a little—down.”

“No,” Liza said. “No, it’s great. I’m fine.”

Gillian was quiet for a moment. “You’re my fifth phone call today,” she said. “And I make the bad news calls first. You and your baby are healthy. All’s well, Liza.”

All was, of course,
not
well, hadn’t been
well
in quite a while, and it was sort of exhausting to be the only one who seemed to be aware of this. Something about Gillian’s statement nagged at her. She thought of the way her dad’s voice had changed when she’d asked him about Gillian. She thought of him alone in the hospital room when she and her sisters had come to meet Gracie. She thought of that night, two decades earlier, when she’d heard the woman’s name, over and over and over again, the smell of cigarette smoke, her father yelling and her mother crying, the night after which everything had changed for her, in a way that was small but distinct, distanced her from her sisters and made her suspicious of her parents.

“Did you sleep with my father?” she asked.

There was a satisfying beat of silence, and then, “I beg your pardon?”

She hadn’t meant to ask, of course. But there was satisfaction in suddenly having the upper hand in an exchange for what felt like the first time in ages.
Gillian, Gillian, Gillian.
This looming figure, larger than life, who had left such a lasting mark on their family history.

“I have to say,” Gillian said archly, “that’s the first time I’ve ever been asked that question.”

It had been fun for a second, the gratification of saying the thing you weren’t supposed to say, of so blatantly violating the social order. But she began to lose her nerve. She didn’t
want
to know if her father had slept with someone else, she realized. They’d all grown up disgustingly inured to their parents’ erotic proclivities. That was enough. Life was hard enough. “I just wondered if—”

“Why on earth would you—” Gillian sounded furious now, and she realized the extent of what she’d said, how stupid it had been, how damning. “Your father was my colleague. Your mother was my
patient.
Not that it’s even remotely an appropriate question or any of your business.”

“I just—” An incorrigible tear had fallen from her eye right onto a freshly inked correction on the paper before her; green ink bled into a tiny Rorschach. She’d spoken without any thought at all of her child, a kid who already lacked both a stable father and a mother who had any idea what the hell she was doing, a kid who at least deserved a competent and compassionate doctor. “Gillian, I— Dr. Levin, I didn’t mean— I’m sorry for saying that; it just— Of course it’s not my business.”

“No,” Gillian said. “It’s certainly not.”

You’re healthy, at least,
she thought, a hand on her belly, and when she apologized again, “I’m really, really sorry, really,” she wasn’t sure if it was to Gillian or the baby.

—

F
orty years: he couldn’t quite wrap his head around it. He’d sent his wife an ostentatious bouquet to the store that morning, hydrangeas and tiger lilies and some kind of inedible kale. She’d called him to thank him but she’d sounded distracted and it made him feel like some sad teenage kid sending carnations to the prom queen. She was now, having brought the flowers home, rearranging the blooms in their vase, and she looked up at him and smiled. “These really are lovely,” she said. “I feel bad I didn’t send anything to you.”

She hadn’t necessarily forgotten, but she’d left before he awakened and only wished him a happy anniversary when she called to thank him from work, so he couldn’t tell if she would have remembered on her own. They’d never been much for holidays like that—holidays that didn’t involve the kids—but they tried to do something on the various milestones that accumulated, flowers from him or little notes from her, expensive dinners out, drives along the lakefront. And sex: they always had sex on their anniversary. It was, however crass, one of the few unfaltering pillars holding up their union. But perhaps they’d outgrown that. Perhaps they’d gotten complacent, regarding their decades-long marriage as a point of fact instead of the miracle that it was. Standing at the kitchen counter, they’d eaten swordfish left over from the grill and a salad she’d thrown together; he updated her on the ginkgo tree and she told him about her employee Drew’s insistence that they set up a Facebook page for the store.

Now she was making the coffee for the morning, setting the timer. “Any chance you wouldn’t mind taking the dog out? I thought I’d jump in the shower before bed.”

“Sure,” he said, turning to jingle his keys in the direction of Loomis.

“Thank you,” she called after him.

He loved Marilyn more, he was pretty certain, than anyone had ever loved another person. It almost suffocated him sometimes. And it was inevitable that one could grow used to that kind of luck, the way you’d grow used to anything, your body adapting around a presence or an absence. But of
course
it was a miracle, of course it was blindly, baldly phenomenal that he and Marilyn had not only found each other—out of all the other people on the earth, in the Chicagoland area, in the Behavioral Sciences Building that day so many years ago—but also that they were still
here,
together, that they hadn’t divorced or murdered each other or, worse, fallen into stagnant suburban silence, dead-eyed dinners and separate beds and hostile jokes about the toilet seat. That they still made each other laugh. That they made love, in their sixties, more often than they had in their thirties. That the sight of her at the end of the day still brought him so much joy.

He loved his daughters infinitely, of course. He would die for them, any one of them, for any reason, and he’d known this from the moment Marilyn had guided his hand—his twenty-five-year-old hand—shyly across her belly, swelled with Wendy, and he felt the faint flicker of a kick. He knew from that second that he would love their children with an inexpressible ferocity. And it only became easier, surprisingly, when they emerged from the womb and started to grow into little people. But he loved Marilyn more. He’d accepted this early on. Each one of his children was a singular, baffling miracle, a joy, an utter delight. But they came from Marilyn; he watched each one of them grow within and emerge from her body, he saw her in the subtle nuance of each of their faces, their posture, their frenetic hand gestures. Marilyn held his heart and she treated it with such meticulous care, filled in all of the little holes with her attention and affection and benevolence. Four whole decades she’d been doing this.

Loomis pulled him over to a thatch of milkweed and he allowed himself to be guided, turning back to look at their house, seeing the light come on in their bedroom, letting himself get a little histrionic, thinking of her. He was governed primarily by the part of himself that contained the love for his wife, his love for her endless capacity for love, for her optimism, for the world that she saw in which no one was ugly or evil, just hurting. That part had always been the largest. She was his, and he was hers, and he had never gotten over the mystifying luck of his draw. Some mornings he woke before her and watched her, watched her twitching eyelids, watched her
choosing,
willfully, to spend her life with him, to crawl into bed beside him each night and to kiss him, always, even if they were fighting; to make their bed every morning; to give birth to his children and raise them and regale him drowsily with stories of their troubles and achievements. She promised to love him, and part of his infatuation was sheer confusion. How, why? Why still? How dare they take these years for granted; how dare they pretend it was a night like any other night, dish soap and running shoes, when in fact the universe had allowed him to be with his best friend, his partner in all things, for over forty years? Fatigue be damned, he would wake Marilyn, take her hands, impart this revelation to her. He tugged the dog toward home.

The phone rang as he was retrieving Loomis’s after-walk snack, and he smacked his head on the hard edge of the low shelf in the pantry, and so his voice, when he answered—a smarting string of expletives running through his mind, a hand rubbing his head, Loomis sniffing worriedly at his knees—was not quite friendly.

“Yes?” he said, and there was a pause before the caller replied, “Hi—David?”

And she flooded back with ease, Gillian Levin, the woman who had once meant so many things to him and to his family. He’d discovered at some point that it was just easier not to think about her at all. She’d left the office not long after they stopped having their dinners, went to start her own obstetric practice on the Far North Side, and after a while life took over, filled in the spaces that used to be occupied by their friendship. His daughters continued to mature; his wife fell in love with him again; their circumstances were complicated anew by college tuition, by sons-in-law, by grandkids.

Until now, apparently. Loomis shoved his snout between David’s knees, still concerned for his well-being. He reached down to rub behind the dog’s ears.

“It’s okay,” he said to Loomis, before realizing the strangeness of it. “I mean—yes, hi, this is David. Hi.”

“It’s Gillian Levin.” The ludicrousness of her feeling the need to introduce herself. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”

“Not at all.”
It’s my fortieth wedding anniversary.

“Well, I won’t keep you long. I just have— I spoke to Liza this afternoon, David.”

And his blood immediately ran cold, thinking that maybe his daughter’s dark dreams were coming true, that in fact there
was
something wrong with her baby.

“I’m sorry, that was—poorly phrased. She’s fine. Prenatally. But she mentioned something quite upsetting on the phone.”

Had he missed something? Should he have been more concerned about Liza’s mental state, not just passed it off as the routine jitters of a first-time mother? He thought of Marilyn, asleep among the paint fumes in their kitchen on Davenport Street.

“She asked if you and I had slept together,” Gillian said.

The gods were not on his side during this conversation. He steadied himself against the kitchen sink. “She
what
?”

“I told her no, of course. But I— It seemed like a gross invasion of privacy, and I just— I’m not suggesting that you…”

“No, that— I can’t imagine where she—got that.” His heart was pounding. It seemed unfair that the past was just allowed to pop up through the phone mounted on your kitchen wall.

“I’ve tried very hard to close the door on that part of my life,” Gillian said. “I mean, not— Your friendship meant a great deal to me, David.”

He swallowed. “Yours too.”

“But I never—I’d never— I have a reputation to uphold.”

“Of course,” he said, dumbly. It was so unexpected, all of this. Was Liza experiencing some kind of psychosis? But no, certainly—she had to have heard something, way back when.
Sensed
something. Their forgotten middle child, easy and unassuming. Could she really have been carrying this suspicion around for nearly twenty years? “I’m not sure what to do,” he said.

“I just thought you should know,” Gillian said.

“Sure. I’m sorry. I’m not sure— This is perplexing to me. But I’m sorry it happened.”

“Nothing for you to apologize for,” she said.

“Well.” There was a stillness, a long quiet moment in which it would have been normal for one of two friendly old colleagues to propose a future get-together.

“Sweet?” His wife’s voice, overhead.

“Marilyn’s calling me,” he said reflexively. Her name was a grenade.

“Of course.” Gillian paused. “Take care of yourself, David.”

“I’m sorry, again,” he was saying, but by the time he’d finished, she was gone.

When he came into their bedroom, Marilyn was sitting on the edge of the bed in his threadbare old St. Clement’s Basketball T-shirt, the one she’d managed to spare from the covetous hands of their girls. She’d let her hair down and she was smiling at him, a kind of smile he hadn’t seen for several months.

Life’s insistence on juxtaposing darkness and light would never cease to amaze him. That Marilyn was entirely oblivious to Gillian’s return seemed like a scientific impossibility. His anniversary gift, perhaps. He decided to seize it.

“Who was on the phone?” she asked.

A little pinprick of guilt. “Food for the Poor.”

“Way to bring down the mood, handsome man.”

“You’re so beautiful,” he said simply.

“Forty years is a pretty big deal,” she said. “You think I’d let you off that easy?”

He came over to her in a kind of leap, and it made her laugh aloud.

1984–1985