CHAPTER 10
I’m careful not to make eye contact with Leo throughout breakfast. I can feel him watching me, but I can’t risk my kids seeing whatever lustful madness might cross my face if we lock eyes. I make an overly complicated breakfast of from-scratch waffles and sausage. I go for a slightly longer than usual run and find that I have burned off zero percent of my nervous energy. I shower and dress and head back downstairs. I’ve caught Arthur’s attention.
“Do you have something today?”
I stop on the stairs. I look at him and then, finally, at Leo. “Why?”
“That dress. Do you have a party?”
I look down at my yellow sundress, and I don’t really have an explanation. My regular T-shirt and jeans uniform didn’t seem good enough today. Maybe on some unconscious level I think jeans are hard to get off and leave seam lines on your skin? I silently curse myself for showing my hand.
“Oh, I’m a little behind on laundry. Why don’t you grab Howie’s gift and I’ll drop you at the movie theater.”
“Mom. It’s only ten-thirty.”
“Right.” Leo’s at the kitchen counter pretending to read something on his phone, but I catch him stifling a laugh.
After Jenna’s come for Bernadette and we hear her car pull onto the main road, Leo crosses the kitchen and takes me into his arms. With my body on high alert, I realize that I am badly in need of this hug. The strength of his arms around me and the reassuring smell of him is starting to calm me down.
“So where are we right now?” he says into my hair.
“I’m terrified,” I admit.
“Me too. Can I take you out to the tea house?”
It feels like the right idea, to get away from the smell of waffles and stacks of dishes into a space where we can think more clearly. “Sure,” I say, and he takes my hand as we walk barefoot outside.
When we’re inside, he shuts the door. I’m not sure where to be so I sit down on his unmade bed. Leo doesn’t join me.
“Want me to make a fire?”
“It’s pretty warm in here.”
“Right.” He straightens the chair at the table. He folds a sweater that had been hanging on the back. It feels like he’s stalling. I scoot back on the bed and curse the dress choice again. I want to bring my knees to my chest in a protective posture so that I can feel safe while I discern what’s happening here. Out of propriety, I can only sit crisscross-applesauce, which leaves me feeling childish and exposed.
“Can I come sit with you?” he asks.
“Of course.” He walks the two steps to the bed and sits down carefully, like the placement of his body might accidentally detonate a bomb.
I need to touch him and I am starting to worry this might be my last chance. I take his hand in mine and I run my fingers over his palm. I’ll do this forever to avoid hearing him say this was a mistake.
I say, “I know why I’m terrified. What are you so nervous about? Don’t you do this all the time?” I’m trying to lighten things up, like we’re just Nora and Leo shooting the breeze, but it falls flat.
“You’re a real person.”
“Because I drive a Subaru?” I’m not sure when I developed this knack for bringing up the world’s least sexy things at the worst possible times.
“Because I know you. I don’t have a lot of experience with that.”
“Well, I don’t have a lot of experience at all,” I say.
“We don’t have to do this.” He says this, but now his hand is on the inside of my crossed ankle. He’s studying the line he’s drawing up the length of my calf. The feel of his fingers barely touching my skin as they reach the back of my knee makes me catch my breath.
“I think we do,” I say, almost in a whisper because I don’t trust my voice. He looks up and kisses me deeply, gripping his hands behind my head, as if I’m a flight risk. As if. I am so dizzy with this kiss that I don’t know when my arms wrap around his neck and my legs find their way around his back. The dress, as it turns out, was a good decision. We are in a frenzy of clothing removal, and when there is nothing between us, everything but my heart rate slows down. He kisses me slowly, and as he starts to make love to me, I know for sure that Leo hasn’t been acting. In his rawest state, with his guard completely down, he is the same person who’s been sitting on my porch—attentive, listening, staying for the whole story. For the first time in my life, I have left my busy, busy mind and now exist only in the smell of Leo’s neck. The sound of Leo whispering my name. The slick of his skin now damp with sweat. The feeling of my body opening up to something so powerful I don’t know how I’ll return from it.
The daybed’s too small for us to lie side by side afterward, so I turn my back to Leo to gather my thoughts. Where are my thoughts? Leo turns and wraps his arms around me, kisses the back of my neck. I’m feeling a little embarrassed. I have never in my life been this exposed.
“I’ve been thinking about that for a long time,” he says.
“You only met me two weeks ago.”
Leo laughs and kisses my shoulder. “You really aren’t very romantic, are you?”
“I might be an overthinker.”
“I’ll fix you,” he says, and I turn around to face him. He’s joking, but I love the idea of being on the other side of the fixing equation. I love the idea that he thinks I’m worth the trouble. I love that buried deep in that sentence is a hint of the future tense.
My kids know something’s up, but mercifully they don’t know what. They’re at an age where their first suspicion wouldn’t be sex, but they’re also at an age where they are exquisitely tuned in to subtle changes in their mother. I feel them watching me, and I don’t know if it’s the lightness in my body or the smile on my face while I wash potatoes. I know I’m glowing, and there’s nothing I can do to hide that or make it stop.
While everything’s changed, in that first week my routine isn’t so different. Sunrise, breakfast, kids to school, run, shower, tea house from ten to two. Except instead of writing, I lie in bed with a movie star. There’s a lot of sex, like a ridiculous amount of sex. In my previous life, I would have considered half this amount of sex to be a complete nightmare, but now a day spent in bed feels like a day well spent. It’s possible that I didn’t really understand what sex was before Leo.
I used to think about the plumber a lot when I had sex with Ben. Not because I was in any way attracted to the plumber, but more because I’d wonder if I’d called to have him check the seal on the outdoor water spigot. If I hadn’t, the pipes might freeze and burst, and that would be really pricey. A fix like that would bite into my already tight Christmas budget. And I really needed to convince Arthur that he doesn’t need a drum set. Forget the noise, but just the amount of space it would take up and how much it would irritate me to vacuum around it when he was sick of it by New Year’s. On New Year’s Day, I like making a curried chicken salad, but Arthur’s doctor has repeatedly told us that he might want to cut back on dairy. I’d have to break that tradition because of the mayonnaise. But, wait. Mayonnaise is just oil and eggs. There’s no dairy in mayonnaise! Arthur can have all he wants! I could even make macaroni salad and that vegetable dip he likes. Mayonnaise isn’t dairy, I’d smile to myself as Ben rolled off of me. Of course, Ben thought that smile, like everything else, was about him.
I guess the problem with Ben in bed was the same as the problem with Ben out of bed: Ben’s all about Ben. Ben is focused exclusively on what’s going to make Ben happy, what’s going to make Ben feel good, and what’s going to reflect well on Ben to the outside world. With Leo, it’s not about either of us. It’s like there’s this third thing we’ve created. We step into that space and the rest of the world is gone. There is no time, no news, no world outside that daybed until three o’clock.
Leo likes to run his finger from the bottom of my ear, down my neck, and along my collarbone, and sometimes the rhythm of it puts me to sleep. We get up for food deliveries. Sometimes we run errands. We are at once energized and lazy, supercharged and sleepy. I wonder if other people can feel that we are operating on a different energetic wave, like we hear a separate soundtrack and feel the air on our skin in a more exquisite way. Deep down, I’m fully aware that this is not a sustainable reality, but I cling to it like you do with a really good dream when you’re sure you could never replicate the feeling in real life.
Leo has never set foot in my bedroom. He doesn’t so much as brush his hand against mine when my kids are home. We don’t discuss this, but he seems to understand my instinct to protect them. In the darkest corner of my being, where a tiny piece of me still recognizes reality, I know Leo is temporary. I’m in for a horrible fall, but as long as I can keep that as my problem, not theirs, this is worth it.
He starts coming on my runs, which he says are boring. I like a loop because it forces me to finish. And, frankly, my whole life is a loop; every day I end up right where I began. He likes variety, so we start exploring the back country roads that wind around Laurel Ridge. Some stretches are paved and some are dirt, changing up that sound our feet make as we run. We pass an occasional house with a split-rail fence, but mostly the roads have meadows on both sides, lined with the last of the daffodils. Old cherry trees and dogwoods offer sporadic shade, and if the wind blows at just the right time, we run through a shower of white blossoms that feel like confetti.
Sometimes we run so far out that we walk back, and sometimes he holds my hand. We are in the middle of a days-long conversation that winds around the most inconsequential and most monumental details of our lives.
“So, my mom had lung cancer,” he tells me on a walk. “But they didn’t tell me until the very end. They didn’t want to interrupt my filming, like that matters.” He’s quiet for a while. “I finally saw her the day before she died. Luke had been there for two weeks, which really pissed me off. The last thing she ever said to me was ‘movie stars don’t do hospice.’ ”
“What does Luke do?” I ask.
“Luke’s a lawyer. I guess lawyers do hospice. Anyway, in three days I found out she was sick, said good-bye, and she died.”
“So that’s why you’re here?” I hate the neediness in my voice the second I say it.
“You’re why I’m here,” he says. “But before you, this, it felt good to connect to real life—the forest, the sunrise, the schedule. Like a person who knows about that stuff can totally handle hospice.”
Later, in the tea house, he wants to know more about Ben. “There must be something very, very wrong with him,” he says and kisses me so softly that I might start to cry.
He knows most of the story, because he played him in the movie. How we met in college and moved to the city. How I got a job in publishing and he was going to start a tech company. How a year into his start-up, a bigger company launched the same project. How the same thing happened with his next idea, and the next. The movie doesn’t cover the real money stuff—how Ben blew through any money I made almost aggressively. Like he shopped out of anger.
“I guess because he was raised rich, he never expected anything to be hard. He literally couldn’t handle it if things didn’t go his way. Like he was owed.”
“What happened to the grandfather’s money?”
“It was all mismanaged over the years; Ben’s dad didn’t really focus on the business when it was his turn to run it. So what’s left is a bunch of angry, entitled people with no money who don’t know how to take care of themselves.”
“You should have put that in the movie. I would have liked that for his character, like it was hard for me to understand why Trevor was such a tool.”
I move Leo’s hair out of his eyes. “It was my fault too. I let him pretend he was about to hit it big. I covered for him for years because I didn’t want to be wrong about my marriage, my life.”
“You’re a chump,” he kids. “I should tell you, I’m not good with money either. I don’t know anything about it.”
“Except that you can afford a lot of bananas.”
Leo laughs. “So many bananas.”
“Well, I’m rich now, so it’s all good,” I say.
“You are? All my dreams have come true.” He pulls me in tight. “What a catch.”
“I’m serious. The Tea House got me out of debt. When you’ve been in a lot of debt, having no debt feels pretty rich. This isn’t going to be the movie where the heroine has to sell the farm.”
“Thank God. I like the farm.”
“One day, Ben found me in here sorting through a stack of bills, trying to figure out which ones we needed to pay and which ones we could lag on. I said something about how we’d be better off if we both had jobs. And I think that was the end. On that day, I think he added me to the list of people who were getting in the way of his big dreams.”
“That was actually in the movie.”
I laugh, because it all is a blur. Real life made into a movie that turns into a wild affair with the man who pretended to be my husband on-screen. For a person whose life is pretty straightforward, I never thought all my story lines would loop back in on one another.
“Did you love him?”
“Maybe early on. But there are parts of people you can’t unsee after years of living with them. Well, his disinterest in the kids, for one. But also his total self-obsession, his inability to appreciate beauty. Lots of things.”
“I appreciate beauty,” he says. And he smiles a smile I don’t know from the movies. It’s the same one he had when Arthur made it all the way through his script without looking.
“What’s this smile?” I ask, tracing his lips.
“I’m happy. I’m so happy he left you.”
Penny texts me ten times a day: What’s happening now? How long is he staying? Why aren’t you texting me back????? I reply: I am dangerously happy and generally too naked to text you back.
For two hours every afternoon, we are apart and it’s excruciating. He’s in the auditorium playing director, and I’m backstage babysitting. It’s odd to see all the normal people treating me like a normal person. I am not a normal person. I’m Leo Vance’s girlfriend.
“Mrs. Hamilton,” Savanah asks, “are we practicing the market scene today?” I don’t know, I think. I don’t even know what day it is. It hasn’t even been a week since Leo became my lover, and I’m in a fog that I don’t want lifted.
Kate is helping me corral the kids and calls them out in groups to get outfitted for costumes. I let her take over. “I have never seen you like this,” she says.
“Like what?” As if I don’t know.
“Giddy. Loose. Spacey.”
“I am all of those things.”
“So like, what’s the plan? He’s staying a couple of weeks and then leaving after the first performance?”
“Well, that’s what he said before, but now I don’t know. We don’t talk about it, but he kind of talks like he’s staying. Like there’s more than this.” Her look of concern is hard to ignore. “I’m totally delusional, aren’t I?”
“No, my friend, you are in love. We just don’t see what the happy ending looks like yet.” She puts her arm around me and gives me a squeeze.
Sometimes I leave the kids with Kate so that I can stand at stage left and watch Leo direct. First of all, I just like looking at him. And if I’m lucky I’ll catch his eye and he’ll shoot me a look that makes me shiver. I also like to see Leo doing what he does, trying to teach the kids about acting. He takes the whole thing so seriously.
Leo seems to think that Oliver is phoning it in. He’s squatting down in front of Ty Jackson’s unusually small frame and looking him right in the eye. “I need you to get into Oliver’s head.”
Ty just stares at him. “His head?”
“I need you to imagine his circumstances. You have no parents, no home.”
“I have a swimming pool,” Ty tells him.
“You do. But Oliver doesn’t. I need you to imagine your parents are gone and you have nothing but the clothes you are wearing right now. You don’t have a blanket to keep you warm. Not one single friend.” Twelve other cast members look on as Ty closes his eyes and tries to imagine. Twelve other cast members are horrified when Ty bursts into tears.
Leo puts his arms around Ty. “That’s it. Use that in this next scene.”
I rush out and say, “Let’s take a little break.” Too far, I mouth to Leo.
When the kids are getting picked up from rehearsal, Leo walks Ty out to find his mother. The kids and I stay a few feet behind, as if this is either highly personal or highly professional and we shouldn’t be seeing.
“Hey, I’m Leo,” he says, sticking his hand out to Ty’s mom, who seems to be unable to control her smile. “I think I owe Ty here an apology, and I wanted you to know.”
“What? Oh, I’m sure he’s fine. We just can’t get over the fact that you’re directing this play. Never in a million years.” Ty has both of his arms around his mom’s waist.
“I made him cry. And I’m really sorry.” To Ty, “You’re such a good actor, I forgot you’re ten. Forget all that stuff I said, okay? You were doing it perfect before.”
Ty lets go of his mom and hugs Leo. “Okay,” he says.
“You’ve just got to own up,” Leo says at dinner, gnawing on a chicken bone. “If you do it enough, it’s not even that hard. ‘I blew it, I’m sorry.’ It’s not such a big deal.”
“I really thought Ty was going to lose it,” says Arthur.
“It’s the only way. When you screw up, you’ve got to make it right,” says Leo. “This is my dad’s favorite thing to talk about—personal responsibility. If you own up to not being perfect, life gets easier. And let’s face it, I was totally off base. I don’t know anything about kids. You guys are the only kids I know.”
I wonder if my kids are thinking about Ben. I wonder if they ever noticed how he’d double down on every misstep just to avoid admitting he was wrong. I hope they can’t see on my face how absolutely in love with Leo I am in this moment. I hope that, while I can no longer be saved from myself, they are taking this at face value: We have a nice houseguest who’s helping with the play and sharing his worldview. But I have to admit that the four of us around the kitchen table feels like something much more than that.
“I’m embarrassed when I have to say sorry. Like I feel all hot inside,” says Bernadette.
“Then you should keep doing it until it’s easy,” says Leo. “But only when you’re actually wrong.”
“I don’t think Ty’s going to be a very good Oliver,” says Arthur.
“Me neither,” says Leo. “But we gotta let that go and just do the best we can.”
Arthur nods at Leo, like with a profound understanding. Something is happening over chicken and rice and green beans. Wisdom is being exchanged. Some might call it parenting. I marvel at the fact that this moment was created by someone besides me. Even when Ben was here, I used to wake up in the middle of the night worrying that every life lesson my kids would ever get would come from me. Do they know how to cross the street? Do they know to run in a zigzag if they’re being chased by a bear? The lessons they’d learn from Ben would be more like cautionary tales: Don’t be an entrepreneur if you don’t want to work at it. Don’t belittle your kids if you want them to love you.
Leo smiles at me over his wineglass. We clean up; we watch Wheel of Fortune. He insists that I go up and read to them and tuck them in. He goes out to the tea house and we text until we both fall asleep. This routine is preposterous really. I barely sleep, and I haven’t written a word since that first kiss. But I don’t want a single thing to change.