Forty-four
Leah was on the road by five in the morning to catch Steven before he opened the shop. She drove through the darkness with the line from Scruples running a loop in her mind: Who can teach you about the times when the well of love seems to run almost dry and you just have to keep going on faith?
The gut punch she felt when Bridget told her she’d seen Steven with another woman made it painfully clear that her well of love had not run dry. The threat of losing her husband instantly set her priorities straight: she was going home. If not for the few glasses of wine with dinner, she would have gotten into the car the night before. Instead, she packed her bag and lay awake for hours, mentally rehashing the past few months and wondering when, exactly, her marriage had gone off the rails. With every inch she combed over, she blamed herself more.
Now, as she drove on the Long Island Expressway, the “beautiful woman” Bridget had described took on more dimensions. She must be younger. She could have sex at the drop of a hat—and did. Leah tortured herself by imagining Steven touching this woman the way he touched her, kissing her the way her kissed her.
She could barely wait another moment to see Steven. But she arrived at rush hour, and she was stuck waiting on the street as precious minutes clicked by. By the time she reached the garage underneath their apartment building, her stomach was in knots.
Inside her building, she didn’t bother with the elevator, walking the ten flights to their apartment. Turning the key in the door, she was in a sweat.
Steven, alerted by the sound of the door, met her in the foyer. And then she had a horrific thought: What if he wasn’t alone?
“Leah! Why didn’t you tell me you were coming home?”
Maybe she should have. As much as she wanted to know the truth, she didn’t want to see it walking out of her bedroom.
He was dressed in khaki pants and a navy polo; he’d been so looking forward to not having to wear a suit every day. He’d worked for all these years at a job he didn’t particularly like to provide for their family, and now all he wanted was to retire and spend his days building a business with his wife, and she was denying him that. Oh, and she’d chosen to spend the summer apart. And never wanted to have sex. So—shocker—the man had turned elsewhere.
He walked over to hug her, but she pulled back.
“Are we alone?” she whispered.
“What? Of course. Are you expecting someone?”
She felt a wave of exhaustion. She’d used up so much emotional energy to get to the apartment, and now that she’d arrived, the most difficult part was still ahead of her.
She walked past him into the kitchen, checking the sink for any lipstick-stained glasses. He took the bag from her shoulder.
“What’s going on? Is something wrong with Sadie?”
She leaned against the counter. “Sadie’s fine.” Or, she would be. Heartbreak healed. At least for young people it did. She wasn’t so sure how she herself was going to cope.
“Then what’s wrong?”
“Bridget saw you yesterday afternoon.”
“Really? Where? I didn’t see her.”
“I know,” she said, hugging herself. “Apparently, you were occupied.”
Steven looked at her quizzically, and then she saw the slow realization dawn on his face.
“She saw me with someone.”
“Yes,” Leah said, her voice breaking. She shook her head, trying to speak without crying. “I know things haven’t been great between us, but how could you . . .”
He took her hands. She looked into his eyes, bracing herself.
“It was Anouk Jansen. From the cheese shop,” Steven said.
“What?”
“That customer at Bailey’s Blue who gave you her card. She’s a real estate agent. I’ve been looking for a new space. I thought if I did all the legwork, if I found a great new spot for the store, you’d get excited about the idea.”
“This is about the cheese shop?” She pressed her hand to her forehead, remembering now the brunette in the shop the day Mrs. Fryer made a fuss about the landlord selling the building.
“She works with a lot of food industry clients, so she understands the need for refrigeration and display space, the health department codes—”
“So you’re not having an affair.”
“Leah, I love you. I am not having an affair. I’m sorry you would ever, ever think that I would.”
In an instant, the very idea that she’d accepted as fact just minutes earlier now seemed absurd. He wasn’t cheating on her. Their marriage wasn’t doomed.
She felt almost faint with relief. “But why didn’t you call me back last night?”
“I was worn out after the day at the store, running around looking at spaces, and then teaching the cheese class at eight. And yeah, when I get really tired, I’m a little pissed off that you’re not around. So that’s part of it, sure.”
The cheese class. She’d totally forgotten about it.
She reached for him, throwing her arms around his neck and inhaling the scent of him, fresh from the shower. The back of his hair was still damp. He kissed her.
“I’ve missed you,” he murmured.
“I’ve missed you, too,” she said, pressing her body against his. He slid his hands underneath the back of her T-shirt, and the simple motion gave her goose bumps. He kissed her and she could feel his arousal, and from somewhere deep inside, her own desire stirred.
If only they could stay like that, making out like teenagers. This, her body could do.
Steven took her by the hand and led her to the bedroom. She’d been away so long that she noticed the scents of home she didn’t usually appreciate: the lavender sachets in her dresser drawers, the faint vanilla from her bedside candle.
“You’re going to be late opening the shop,” she said.
“I certainly am.”
Side by side on the bed, he tugged off her T-shirt and she wriggled out of her shorts.
She felt, unlike other recent attempts at sex, that it was crucial she find a way to get her body to cooperate. This was their reunion. This was the moment that would set the tone moving forward. If she wanted a novel-worthy happy ending, she needed to do her part.
Panicked, she willed herself to feel passion. Surely there must be some way to accomplish mind-over-matter. She thought back to the last time she’d felt turned on: it had not been with Steven. She’d been reading Scruples. And so she replayed the sex scene in her mind of Billy ravaging the helicopter pilot. She felt her pulse quicken, a flutter in her belly—enough response to at least accept her husband’s excitement, if not match it. When he stroked her thighs, his hands moving between her legs, she told herself that it didn’t matter if she felt pleasure. Going through the motions was okay. As long as her body cooperated enough for him to move inside of her, and it did. Thank god it did! Steven, lost in pleasure, kissed her neck, his hands winding in her hair. All she felt was relief that at least he was happy. It didn’t matter that she felt, well, a little robotic. Maybe she’d never experience physical ecstasy again—maybe it was simply something she had to let go of.
He moaned in a primal way that gave her a little chill, a shiver that told her she wasn’t completely dead inside. Maybe this was the best she could hope for from now on. It was enough—it had to be enough. And it would be her little secret. Surely, what Steven didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
Surely, their marriage needed this one little lie.
The campus felt strange and familiar at the same time. It was like walking through a stage set of a place she had once known.
Sadie had two weeks before classes officially started at the end of August, and she needed that extra time to get her head on straight. She found herself wandering in a fog from task to task: Registering for classes. Meeting friends for coffee. Checking books out of the library. All the while, she thought about Mateo. It was irrational; they had had a brief summer fling. She thought for sure that once she was back on campus, back to reality and away from the insular world of the winery, she would forget all about him. But so far, that hadn’t happened.
Mercifully, she had a big distraction that morning: her first academic meeting of the semester. On her way up the stairs to the English department offices, she considered yet another in endless variations of how to admit to her academic advisor, her academic idol, that she’d failed to get her thesis off the ground.
Dr. Moore wore one of her trademark colorful dresses, this one a green-and-blue pattern that looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. Her face was brightened by orange-red lipstick, her big dark eyes shining, lit from within. She couldn’t help but feel happy at the sight of Dr. Moore, even though it was her moment of reckoning.
Sadie sat in the chair opposite her desk. Her palms were slick with perspiration despite the whirring table fan cooling the room.
“How was your summer?” Dr. Moore asked.
“It was good,” Sadie said.
“I hope the time away helped get your creative juices flowing.”
It would be a relief, really, to simply admit defeat. She’d been dreading this moment, but now that it was here, she was ready to just let go.
“Actually, it was just the opposite. I didn’t get any writing done.”
“I see,” Dr. Moore said, steepling her fingers. “What did you do?”
“I helped out at my grandparents’ winery.”
“That sounds interesting. How long have they had the winery?”
“My whole life,” Sadie said. “But this was the longest time I’d ever spent there.”
Dr. Moore nodded. “Sometimes when you’re engaged in the world, it’s hard to make time to write. But then, when you get back to the page, these are the experiences that bring enrichment to your work.”
Sadie nodded. Then she said, “I don’t know. I think it was one big distraction.”
“Did you do any reading?”
“No. Not really.”
“Sadie. I find it hard to believe you didn’t read any books all summer long.”
“Well, I mean, I read some trashy novels. But just out of curiosity. I wasn’t reading reading them.” She would not mention the book club—no matter how far off the rails the meeting went.
“What novels?”
“Oh—nothing you’ve ever heard of. Books from the seventies and eighties. They were from my grandmother’s book club.”
“Try me,” Dr. Moore said with a smile.
“Um, well, one was called Lace. Another was Chances . . .”
“By Jackie Collins.”
“You know that book?”
“Of course.”
“And also Scruples by Judith Krantz.”
Dr. Moore nodded. “And what did you think of the books?”
“Oh, the writing is terrible,” Sadie said.
“And yet the novels are classics in their own way.”
“Classics? No. I mean, really—have you read them?”
“Yes,” Dr. Moore said.
Sadie looked at her in surprise. “So then how can you call them classics?”
“Italo Calvino, in The Uses of Literature, said: ‘A classic is a book that has never finished what it has to say.’”
If Sadie didn’t know better, she would think Dr. Moore was mocking her. She couldn’t possibly be suggesting that she take these books seriously. A book’s merit was based on the words on the page.
Ever since she was a little girl, Sadie had thought a lot about the written word. She thought about words as she fell asleep at night; she thought about them when she dressed in the morning. She arranged them in her mind like colors on a painter’s palette. In her mind, she could make them dance. Words conveyed meaning. Words had power. Words gave everything and asked nothing in return. Susan Sontag wielded words like a weapon. And yet the words she so admired failed to spark the creative velocity that she needed to get her thesis to the finish line.
“I don’t know what these books were trying to say, if anything,” Sadie said.
“People are still reading them forty years after they were published. Why do you think that is?”
“My grandmother has a big book collection. I don’t know how many other people are still reading those books.”
“Are they still in print?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Moore leaned forward. “You read these books and nothing else all summer?”
Sadie swallowed hard. “Well, yes.”
“I want you to think about why that might be. Actually, correction: I want you to write about why that might be.”