10

ELEANOR IS SLEEPY from the two glasses of wine she drank at lunch. She wouldn’t call herself drunk. Tipsy maybe. At home on the computer she writes, “Phil, what happened the other night? Why so many members of your soon-to-be estranged family? My girlfriend thinks that you and I are going to sleep together. In fact, she is convinced of it. I told her that this would be impossible because I am married to Frank and absorbed in the lives of my kids.” She stops typing and thinks about her lunch with Kaye at the plaza near the lake. They’d sat at the tables on the sidewalk patio, where they could see the lake between the high-rise condos across Sheridan Road. High-rise, by Wilmette standards.

“It isn’t completely out of the range of possibility,” she continues to write. “I am forty-eight. But I exercise to keep fit and I color my hair to hide the grey. I am not unattractive. Sometimes I want to ask my husband, ‘Honey, do you think I am still attractive?’ But he would look at me and say, ‘You might as well ask me if you look fat. What am I supposed to say?’ Isn’t there more than just how you look? Pheromones perhaps? Or animal magnetism? Do you sense this about me? Am I magnetic?”

At lunch, Eleanor and Kaye had both ordered sandwiches, gazpacho, and white wine, and before the drinks even arrived, Kaye had said, “What the heck was that all about?” referring to the meeting with Phil. “Who brings a family to see his old girlfriend?”

Eleanor had replied that she was not Phil’s old girlfriend. “We were just friends.”

Now she deletes the email and begins again. “Phil, do you really have lawyers putting your divorce together?” Kaye had rolled her eyes when Eleanor explained, once again, that Phil’s wife was living in the same house while she looked for her own. “Why is your wife living with you if she has left you? And don’t tell me it’s to save money. Is your divorce really happening?” Eleanor types. “You know, she emailed me the other day, sort of a territory-marking activity, I would say.” And then she adds, “Like my dog would do.”

Just as the sun became hot over their bacon, lettuce, and tomato, Eleanor had explained to Kaye, “I didn’t realize we’d go to a club, watch his kid sing, and then go out to eat afterward with his wife and mother-in-law.” She wonders how she may have misread Phil’s signals, that after the twenty minutes of hearing Jillian play, should she have taken Kaye and gone home? “Did we do something wrong?” she asked Kaye.

Kaye had answered her, “Remember my idea to go as your lesbian girlfriend to your high school reunion?”

“I do,” Eleanor replied. “I really shouldn’t listen to you.”

“Your wife,” she writes to Phil, “wants me to leave you alone. She says you have had many women and that you leave a trail of them behind you. This doesn’t seem like the Phil I remember, whose parents remained married while their children were in high school, who dated the same girl for two long years, even went to college with her before breaking up. Now I wonder myself why I am getting involved with someone like this. Please convince me that there are no other women ‘friends.’ Why would your wife lie to me? I can think of many reasons why she would, but with nothing going on between us now, why does she even care? She says that she is praying for me.” Delete.

“Phil, there is nothing I hate more than a woman who says she is praying for me. I don’t think of myself as the kind of person who needs to be prayed over. I thought I was a helpful sort of person. I used to volunteer at my kids’ school for hours a week, but I got burned out. I am burned out from being a wife.” Delete. Delete.

Kaye’s voice is in the back of Eleanor’s head. Their lunch conversation had become heated. “You do so want to sleep with him. And why not? He’s a Norse god.”

Eleanor had answered, somewhat too seriously, “That’s not enough, Kaye.”

She types. “No one I know seems to pay attention to me the way that you do. If you would just say that what you really want is to sleep with me, then I would feel good psychologically and then we wouldn’t actually have to do it.” Again, delete.

Eleanor tries to think about the last time Frank wanted her spontaneously rather than out of necessity. She tries to think of the last time she wanted Frank, or when she wanted someone other than Phil. She comes up blank.

“Dear Phil, how is your garden? Have any good vegetables ripened yet? I have never had a garden here. The house is a hundred years old, and I have learned that there is lead paint in the soil around it, and that it takes centuries to biodegrade. So, we only have flowers, and the dog tramples them over. The yard looks terrible. There are kicked up piles of dirt along a path where she runs. Still, I am having a cookout dinner party in the yard next weekend. Will you come?” Press: send.

IT’S THE MIDDLE of the night and Phil can’t sleep. This is a chronic problem now. No sex, no sleep, no comfort, no warmth, no love. He gets up and walks around the bedroom in the darkness, watching the shadows that the outside light casts on the rumpled bedclothes. Finally, he crosses the hallway to the stairs and down to the kitchen. Phoenix is lying on the slatted wood floor on her side, legs out. He startles her as he turns on the light. She raises her head and he bends down to pat it. “Hey, girl.” He fills a glass of water and drinks like he has been thirsty for hours and the water will make him sleep. Then he fills Phoenix’s water bowl. In the kitchen window, he sees his reflection in the night blackness of the glass, blurry and wavering as he shifts from one leg to the other.

From the hallway of the house, he can hear the white noise of the refrigerator. His daughter’s door is closed. His wife is in the guest room off the living room, he presumes. Her door is also closed. Simeon the cat is asleep on his back near the family room couch. Phil can see Simeon from where he is standing, his white cat chest gently rising and falling, legs quivering at an awkward position half in the air. Phil has never seen another cat sleep in this way. For a dog, it would be a signal that he is comfortable enough to show his belly. But Phil doesn’t know what this means for a cat.

He thinks of the visit to Eleanor and her barbecue. How will she see him when he arrives alone, not surrounded by his family as he was at their last meeting? Will she think of him as someone incapable of keeping a family together? He has a knot in his stomach. He drinks more water and opens his computer, which is sitting on the kitchen island, recharging.

Phil begins to write. The internet is a thread connecting him to someone who will listen and sympathize, and it feels like a direct conversation, in the moment, even though it is not. He is aware that some days it doesn’t matter if it is Eleanor or someone else.

Hi Eleanor, I know I mentioned that my wife is leaving me, that we are trying to split amicably so that we can remain friends and still share the business together, that at night we sit at the table in the dining room with all of our assets spread out on sheets of paper, and a calendar open. Sometimes she won’t say anything to me but to answer my questions with a single word or sound. Sometimes she cries and I can’t reach her from where I am sitting to comfort her, and I think she is the one who has put that distance between us so that she can’t change her mind about leaving me. But I didn’t exactly tell you the whole story.

No. Wrong. Delete.

Eleanor, my wife and I are getting divorced. I have told you some of this before. She has a friend she is with constantly, and I can’t watch them together anymore. He comes to our house. He drives her to church. They don’t touch each other in public, but I don’t know what they are doing when I am not around. And I have seen his text messages. About how he wants to hold her hand or sit with her or put his arm around her when she cries. I wouldn’t have written that sort of crap to a girl when I was in high school. I have tried to convince her to come back. I want to say to her, ‘You don’t have to do this.’ But now the words feel stuck inside me. I don’t really say anything to her.

Too much information? Does she need to know this much? Delete.

Dear Eleanor, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression of me, that I am the same person I was when we were in high school, that I didn’t grow up and change. My wife wouldn’t sleep with me anymore, so I found Sarayu and Linda saw the emails. That is why Linda gets upset when you and I talk or email. Yet it doesn’t occur to her that her friend—the guy she goes with to church—isn’t going to bother me? That her shift from a non-believing Catholic to attending a Protestant megachurch with a man who is ten years younger doesn’t seem a bit strange? You bet it’s strange. I can’t emphasize enough how strange it is to me.

Delete again. He sits back, puts his hands behind his head, elbows out, stretches, breathes, sips more water. He clears his mind. The page is blank. The refrigerator kicks on again. Phoenix rolls onto her other side, flipping her legs into the air, then sighs deeply, sounding human. Once again Phil feels as though he doesn’t have the right words to say what he wants to say. Something like, will you still be there, at the other end of this computer connection, in your home with your family, when you find out who I really am?

Eleanor, I am hoping we can have time to talk and catch up when I see you again. I have a lot to tell you. Can’t wait to see you on the weekend.

He presses send and logs out. Phoenix raises her head and watches him as he pads out of the kitchen, then returns to her former position. Upstairs, Phil lies in his bed and stares at the ceiling for what seems like an hour, until there is light through the thin, vertical spaces between the curtain panels, until he feels his eyes close and eventually he doesn’t know that he is falling asleep.

TRAFFIC HAS BEEN thick and slow. Stopped in his car, Phil texts Eleanor, “I’m running late. Sorry.”

“No worries,” she answers.

He gets to the final stoplight and looks for a parking spot. He can see the source of the traffic jam: people moving their cars in and out of parking spaces along the two-lane street. He taps on the steering wheel impatiently.

He is late because of Linda. He honestly hadn’t expected her to react so strongly. “You are the one who wants the divorce,” he had said, as she found reason after reason for him to stay home. He wanted to say, “For Christ’s sake! I’m visiting her family.” But he avoided Eleanor’s name or anything about her for that matter.

While Phil looked at his wife, who stood with her mouth wide, her hands splayed, pleading, everything about her body exuding anger and hurt, he suddenly wondered about Sarayu and how she must have looked and felt when she read the email he had written to her to say that it was all over. It wasn’t something he had let himself think about in a long time. In Linda’s place, he saw Sarayu’s dark brown eyes, glossy with tears, the shape of her shoulders curved inward, her upper body slumped as she put her head in her hands. Then he saw Eleanor and thought of how he would have to explain himself to her, and that he was sorry for his mistakes. Would she listen? Would she offer him forgiveness?

But, Linda … she’d left him speechless. Should he say that she was right, “Yes, it’s my fault. Please say you won’t leave me. Water under the bridge?” But how much could he change, realistically?

As he opened his mouth to say something, and these thoughts flooded his head, the words were stuck. And once he realized that he had nothing to say to his wife, nothing that she wanted to hear, he picked up his overnight bag and walked out the door to his car. He left. Now he is here, just west of Evanston, waiting for the traffic to abate. What is he doing?