26

Will drops his briefcase on the table by the front door. “Hey,” he says to Carole, who’s sitting on the couch, her arms folded, the current issue of Yoga Journal in her lap. At the sound of his voice, she uncrosses her arms, picks up the magazine, and starts flipping through it.

Will glances up the stairs toward their daughter’s room. “Where’s Sam?” he asks. He doesn’t know that he’s ever seen Carole take the time to sit and read a magazine before their daughter was in bed.

“Watching a movie.”

“Upstairs?”

Carole nods, but she doesn’t look up.

“She okay?”

“Why wouldn’t she be?”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t usually watch TV on a weeknight. I thought maybe she wasn’t feeling well or something.”

“She’s fine.” Carole comes to the end of the magazine and then starts again at the beginning, licking her index finger and using it to flick past the pages, not so fast that she doesn’t quickly scan each one.

“What are you doing, Carole?” Will asks her.

“This is what I hate about Yoga Journal, ” she says. She sounds so fed up, it’s as if she’s at last voicing a serious complaint of many years’ standing. “Every issue, every single issue, there’s something on the cover that you can’t find inside. Look.” She thrusts the magazine at Will, talking faster than usual. “Seven Steps for Turning Bad Habits into Good Ones.” She opens the magazine to the table of contents. “Look. Just look. Do you see ‘Seven Steps for Turning Bad Habits into Good Ones’? No. No you do not. That’s because it’s not there. Page by page, I’ve gone through the entire issue, trying to find anything that might fit the description—‘seven steps for turning bad into good’—and there’s nothing. Not one paragraph.” She slaps the magazine down on the coffee table. Will sits carefully in the chair opposite the couch.

“You don’t have any bad habits, Carole.”

“That is not the point. The point is—”

“Carole?” he interrupts.

“What?”

“Is something going on?”

“You tell me,” she says. He glances upstairs.

“How long’s the DVD going to last?” he asks.

“What?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Yes, I guess you do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She closes her eyes as if there’s no expression, no other gesture that could possibly convey her exasperation. “Will—”

“Wait. There’s something I have to tell you, Carole. I had lunch with my father and—”

“Will, I don’t want to talk about anything until you listen to—”

He holds up one hand, as if directing a driver to stop. It’s the kind of communication—wordless, and, in her opinion, appropriate only for animal trainers or airport ground crews—that has in the past provoked her to walk out on an argument. She makes a little huff of protest.

“We have to talk now,” he says. “If we don’t . . . if I don’t say this now . . .” He shakes his head.

“What is it?”

Will takes a deep breath. “How . . .” He takes another breath. “Carole?” he says, after allowing the silence to grow uncomfortable.

“I’ve, uh . . . something bad’s happened. My fault. I did something stupid, and then I made it even worse. Not on purpose. I had lunch with my father. I . . . God, I’m telling this all backwards. I’m trying to go in the right order, but it’s not—it’s hard to make sense of. I asked him why Mitch left when he did, why he skipped out before the wedding. I had . . . I’d always suspected there was something. Why didn’t you tell me, Carole?”

She takes her hands from her face but she doesn’t look at him. “I . . . I don’t know,” she says. “We . . . I . . . I didn’t plan to keep it a secret.”

“But you did. You kept it a secret for fifteen years. And now, now I’ve done something terrible. And it’s all related, it’s all tangled up in the same . . .” Will trails off, watching Carole shake her head, her eyes downcast.

“After he . . . after Mitch . . . there wasn’t any way to get back to how it was before,” she says. “How I was. Because it was one of those things that—it just divided everything. Me. It divided me into before and after. And how could I change that?” She looks up at him, speaking faster than usual, and more loudly; her voice has lost its characteristic calm. “I mean from the outside would anyone even think I was raped? It was all messed up. Everything was. The person who I, who . . . the, the person was someone I invited into our room. And now there was this ugly, this dirty thing that would play out in front of everyone we knew, everyone we cared about. Our families, people from work, guests from out of town, friends from college. It would . . . I was afraid it would always be, ‘Oh, you remember them, don’t you? She’s the one who was raped, or, or tricked, or . . . or whatever it was, by the groom’s twin brother.’ ” Suddenly Carole is on her feet, pacing and waving her arms as she speaks. Will didn’t even see her get up from where she was sitting; she moved that fast.

“I wanted to save face. Or I guess what I mean is, I didn’t want to lose face. I was scared, Will. And I tried to tell you. Later, I did. But whenever I mentioned Mitch, you changed the subject. You were . . . I felt like you were avoiding the topic. So, I quit. I quit trying so—”

“No!” Will says. “I have no memory, none, of your trying to tell me anything.”

“But I did. And how it turned out—that wasn’t calculated. I didn’t intend for you to not ever know. Maybe . . . maybe that was what your father wanted. Or maybe it was what they both—your mom and your dad—wanted. Or what I thought they’d want. Or vice versa, what they thought I would. I mean, Jesus, Will, you don’t know how many times I’ve gone over this. Anyway, they’re all after the fact, these interpretations. I can’t remember what I was thinking then, that night, and that’s because I wasn’t thinking anything. Except I wanted us to get married and everything to be okay.” She looks at Will, waiting for him to speak, but he says nothing, and she goes on.

“I didn’t have any idea of how . . . how emotionally costly it would become. That wasn’t something I even considered in the moment— why would I?—I never planned to keep it a secret. Not indefinitely. But the longer I didn’t tell you, the more difficult it got. Once I’d said nothing for a day, since it was our wedding day, and then for all of our honeymoon—because I didn’t want to wreck that. It was, you know, our honeymoon, and I wanted to protect it, that little bubble of time. And after, when we were back home, it just got . . . it got harder and harder to imagine myself introducing the topic. We’d be apart from each other all day, both of us working, and I’d have scripted a dialogue in my head, rehearse how I was going to begin it, but whenever the chance presented itself, I . . . I didn’t. It got to be as if it never happened. Sometimes it seemed so unreal, it was as if it had been a sort of, oh, I don’t know, some overwrought fantasy about myself and a famous person, someone who doesn’t even exist outside the media. The way a teenager might dream about having a date with Brad Pitt or someone. Since that’s what Mitch had become, a person who isn’t even real. Not anymore, not for us.”

She looks at Will, who leans forward, his elbows on his knees, considering this idea: Mitch’s transformation from flesh to fantasy. He tries to imagine the comforts, and the cost, of what would amount to a kind of amputation, the erasure of a distempered part of himself, a version of himself he’d be better off without. Wouldn’t the loss leave him desolate, prey to the psychic equivalent of a ghost limb—pain where there is nothing? Pain generated by nothingness. Has this happened already? Has Mitch been removed? Excised?

As if the words bubble of time were a tranquilizing spell, Will finds that he has panned back from the argument. Sees himself and Carole grow smaller and smaller, watches their living room shrink to the size of a shoe box. As he ascends, he listens to something like a voice-over inside his own head. A voice too refined to ever—even in extremis— grow loud or shrill, a voice with Alistair Cooke’s British accent, the measured tone of one of his PBS program introductions, it talks to Will, making reasonable suggestions like “Let’s look at the big picture, Will. Take the long view.”

His arrival on this Zen peak, a height to which he’s aspired but never even come close to attaining, with its atmosphere too thin to allow the waste of oxygen on untamed emotion, leaves him not only detached but with a clear head. It’s as if, after an eternity of fiddling, he’s at last managed to tune in his own thoughts without the interference of static or the indistinct mumbling of other channels.

“The other thing is,” he hears Carole say, “do you remember how fast we got pregnant? How happy we were? I was happy and you were, too, and I . . . I asked myself, why tell you now? For what?” She frowns, shakes her head.

Will sees movement on the stairs. “Samantha!” he says to alert her mother. Carole turns around.

“Hello, sweetheart.” There is nothing in her voice to suggest the two of them might be involved in a conversation of any importance. “You must be ready for dinner, no?”

Sam doesn’t answer. She stands in the middle of the staircase, looking from her father to her mother and then back. “The movie’s over,” she says, finally.

“How about another?” Will offers, and she shakes her head.

“I’m not allowed.”

“Oh, we can break the rules. Every once in a while we can.”

“No,” she says, “we can’t.”

“Aren’t you hungry?” Carole asks.

“It could be anything,” Will says, “anything you want. It could be ice cream.” Sam looks at him, at first with suspicion and then with a peculiarly grown-up expression, a miniature rendition of her mother’s men-just-don’t-get-it look, one delicate eyebrow raised, her mouth puckered in a wry, little twist. She turns to her mother.

“The thing is,” Carole says, “Daddy and I are talking. We have something we need to figure out and—”

“What? What do you?”

“It’s not . . . it’s something . . .”

“Is it money?”

No, Will is about to say, but then he reconsiders—if ever an occasion excused a white lie, this would be it. “It is, Sam,” he tells her. “It is about money.”

“Grilled cheese?” Carole asks. “Or how about an omelet? There are apples from the green market, and I’ll slice them the way you like.” Samantha nods and pushes her hair behind her ears as she follows her mother to the kitchen, showing Will the pale, almost transparent skin of her temple.

“How do you know?” he asks Carole as soon as Samantha has eaten and gone back upstairs. “How can you be sure Luke isn’t— wasn’t—Mitch’s child instead of mine? Because I do remember, and it was fast. Barely nine months from the wedding.”

Carole is shaking her head before he stops talking. “I know,” she says, “I know because he . . . because I made him pull out before it got to that point.”

“You—”

“You don’t think he could have—you can’t think I wouldn’t have known. That I didn’t guess who it was. I knew right away it wasn’t you. It just . . . I just didn’t believe it. Myself. It took me that minute to convince myself that I wasn’t crazy, that it really was him instead of you.”

Will nods slowly. “My dad had it wrong, then. He thought it was the same as with the others. That Mitch didn’t pull off the mask until the end, after . . . that he didn’t reveal himself until it was done.”

“The same as with . . . what others? What are you talking about?”

“It wasn’t the only time. He’d done it before, with other girls.” Will watches Carole’s expression.

“Before? He did it with other girls you . . . girls you knew before?” She’s speaking with her face in her hands, the way someone might cradle an aching jaw.

“Yes. That’s the part that’s . . . that’s how this is connected to the . . . to the mess I’ve made. I saw a woman, an old girlfriend, at the reunion and . . .” He trails off. The two of them watch each other from across the coffee table.

“Elizabeth?” Carole says, finally.

“How did you know?”

“There’s a message. On the machine.” Will raises his eyebrows. “You’d better just listen,” she says, and he gets up, goes to the kitchen phone.

“Hey there, Dr. Moreland,” drawls a familiar voice. “It’s Jennifer. I’m, like, looking at a lab report. Because guess what? As it happened, I found this little hair of yours glued to my thigh with spooge. So I guess we, like, traded—a long one of mine for a short, curly one of yours. And, so, hey, I’m interested in sharing my news with you if you’re, like, interested enough to call me back. Or even if you aren’t.” The machine announces the time and date of the call, then clicks off.

“Shit,” Will says. That Jennifer has left such a message for his wife to hear is a surprisingly destructive act, even from her. He hits the play button and listens to the message once more.

“This isn’t from today, Carole. It’s from . . . it says it’s from Tuesday. Last Tuesday, when I was out of town.” He comes back to the living room. “Unless the date thing’s screwed up?”

“No,” Carole says, her face expressionless.

“So . . .” Will shakes his head. “You’ve . . . you heard this before? Before today?”

“No. You know I always fast-forward through the ones from your patients. But, the . . . the person who left that, that message, Jennifer, her mother called today, just before you got home. After I talked to her, I remembered that before I skipped past one message, I’d heard someone identify herself as Jennifer.” It isn’t only her face. Carole’s voice, too, is without affect.

“Elizabeth?” he says. “Elizabeth called here?”

“She asked me to tell you something.”

“What is it?” Will says when she doesn’t continue.

“I . . . I want to make sure I get it right.” Like a student trying to summon a lesson committed to memory, Carole closes her eyes while she speaks. “A DNA analysis that Elizabeth’s husband, Paul somebody, insisted be made, confirmed that Jennifer is not your child. Apparently, Jennifer told him—Paul—about the . . . about whatever’s going on among you three, and he was angry enough to force the issue. One that Elizabeth considers is now closed, never to be reopened. Jennifer is Paul’s biological and legal daughter. If you attempt to contact Elizabeth or any member of her family, any colleague or associate, any friend or acquaintance, ‘even the fucking paper boy’—that’s a direct quote—you’ll be in violation of the restraining order she’s filing tomorrow.” Carole opens her eyes.

“That’s it?” Will says. “That’s all she said?” He’s so flooded with relief he starts to laugh, just for a moment. The look on Carole’s face sobers him up. She’s furious, her teeth clenched so tightly that a band of muscle stands out in her cheek. “See, I thought . . . I wasn’t laughing because anything was funny. For a month, almost, I’ve thought she, Jennifer, I thought she—”

“You slept with this person. You had sex with her.”

Will sits down; then he stands back up, puts his hands in his pockets. “Yes,” he says.

“She’s . . . she’s a patient?”

“No,” he says. “Was. She was before.”

“Before what? Before you fucked her!” Will doesn’t answer. “Why!” she says. “Why!”

“Why?”

“All right, how? How could you!”

“I—”

Abruptly, Carole’s voice has acquired an edge. “I want a way to understand.”

“I’m sorry. You remember I told you about the girl, the one who came on to me?”

“I think you may have understated the case,” Carole says, “in that you told me she kissed you.” The venom in her voice more than compensates for whatever expression her face lacks.

“She did,” he says. “And then I did what I said I was going to. I told her we couldn’t continue working together and referred her to another therapist. But she came back. Came to the office, refused to leave. Told me she was sorry and carried on. She even cried, or I thought she did. Anyway, I believed her. I believed her enough to let down my guard. I turned my back for a minute—just to disengage while I tried to come up with a way to convince her to leave without exacerbating the whole mess—and when I turned back around she’d taken all her clothes off. Threatened to, well, to make it appear as if I’d tried to rape her unless I . . .”

“Unless you?”

“Complied.”

“Complied.”

“Yes. With her intention to have intercourse with me.”

“Come on! Am I supposed to believe that—”

“Yes! You are. Because she did. And as it turns out, she was looking for a . . . for revenge.”

“Revenge! For what! Revenge for what!”

“I . . . it started when I ran into Elizabeth at the reunion.” Will looks away and then back at his wife. “The fact is, when we broke up, Elizabeth was pregnant, and I . . . I wondered was there a chance of her—the daughter—being my biological child. We talked. I said something that offended Elizabeth. I didn’t mean it the way she took it—I’m not even sure exactly how she took it, other than badly. Whatever she thought, I just wanted to know, not to interfere. As soon as I read her page in the reunion book and saw the date of her daughter’s birth, I . . . I needed to get a fix on it. Needed to know one way or the other. So I asked would she give me a hair sample, so I could have it tested.”

“You wanted proof?” Carole says.

“Yes. Something definitive. Otherwise, it would be open-ended. Alive. I wanted to put it to rest.”

“But how? How could you if she turned out to be yours?”

“I don’t know. I’d have to deal with it, obviously. But it wouldn’t be as—I don’t think it would be as disturbing as not knowing. Anyway, the conversation got combative. I didn’t back down; she got more and more defensive. Clearly, she imagined I was going to . . . to intrude on her life. Or Jennifer’s. She even said I was looking for a surrogate for Luke. But, honestly, I don’t think that was my intent. Not even unconsciously. I’ve thought about this a lot. Maybe if the child had been a boy, but I can’t see myself drawing an equation—I just don’t think that was what I wanted.”

“Well, what did you want?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure. It was a mistake to press her, Carole, and I apologize. I was . . . I don’t know what I was. Lonely, I guess— at loose ends. And she . . . she went ballistic. Must have then misrepresented my request to Jennifer. Characterizing me as . . . as an asshole, evidently. And Jennifer, who is, well, she probably tends to sexualize every transaction, but in this case she must have determined to possess me in return. In response to Elizabeth’s saying I had possessive feelings for her. Jennifer, I mean. Possess me sexually.” Carole stares at him, arms crossed, mouth closed. “And I, uh, I couldn’t . . . didn’t . . . stop it. She didn’t tell me who she was until it was over.”

“Why!” Carole says. “Why! Why didn’t you!”

“I don’t know,” he says. “After she’d refused to put her clothes back on and leave, I just was . . . I don’t know what I was. Struck dumb, basically.”

“But not unaffected.”

“Not unaffected?”

“As in not unable to perform. I mean, come on, Will, it’s not as if a woman can sexually . . . can sexually engage a man without a certain degree of . . . cooperation. A physical willingness.”

“Yes. You’re—well, you’re right. That’s true. But that isn’t within my conscious moral control. It’s not something I can decide whether or not to do.”

“So this would be a case of the, the flesh being weak? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I guess that’s one way to put it.”

“Well, do you have anything to say about that?”

“No.”

“No?”

“What can I say, Carole? I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was aroused. I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“Fine. Fine. Great. Swell. That makes it all okay, right? Will can’t help it if he has a hard-on, can he?” she says to the wall, the chair, an invisible witness or referee. “Do I get to ask why? Why did you, or a part of you, want to have sex with her?”

“Come on, Carole.”

“Why you wanted it enough that you didn’t manage to, to control your physical response?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“No.”

“Well, think of something! I think you owe me the courtesy of trying to explain, don’t you?”

“Well, she was . . . she was attractive. Physically. I said so. She elicited a physical response.”

“It’s not as if you’re deprived at home.”

“No.” Will shakes his head. “Well, I am. I am in that I never get to make love to someone with a face. Leaving me, what, well, alone, I guess.”

“Alone? You? What about me?”

“What about you? Are you lonely, Carole? Because how would I know? You’re not exactly a person with her heart on her—”

“Will, you’re so involved with, with Luke that—”

“That’s too easy! You’re projecting your feelings onto me. I don’t think I’m any more involved with him than you are.”

“He can’t . . . Luke can’t . . .” Carole shakes her head. “He can’t be the end of every argument. He can’t be the cause of every problem we have.”

“Of course he can’t! He isn’t. In fact, it’s become suddenly clear that from the beginning—long before the accident—my brother was—”

“I never didn’t forgive you, Will, for the accident. I forgave you from the beginning. No—that’s not right. Forgiving you would imply I’d weighed what had happened and decided you weren’t—”

“Carole, you can’t just have been automatically saintly. No one is. You’ve repress—”

“I never blamed you! And I am so sick of this stupid, stupid argument. I always thought of it, and I still do think of it, as something that happened to us. Both of us. All of us.”

“So why? Why then? You do have to admit something happened, Carole, something inside you. It wasn’t me who, who . . . our sex life wasn’t the same as it had been. Right away, it wasn’t. The very first time we made love after Luke drowned, it was different. And you were the one who made it different.”

Carole opens her mouth, and he sees a tremor in her chin and her bottom lip. “It’s not you,” she says. “If the accident is anyone’s fault, it’s mine. Not yours. Mine.” She says the word with one hand splayed over her breastbone.

Will throws his hands up over his head. “Yours! How is that possible? What kind of upside-down thinking could lead you to believe any of it was your fault?” Carole looks away, her lips compressed into a tight line. “What?” he says. “What!”

She gives up trying to stop the tears. “I can’t make myself . . . I know this sounds like what you’d call estrogen logic, but I . . . I can’t help feeling that it was, it had to have been a kind of . . . of correction. A realignment. Because of me.”

“What are you talking about! I have no idea what you’re talking about!”

“Luke was”—her voice catches—“he was perfect, he was good. He was a . . . there was nothing wrong about him. And I’m . . . I was afraid I was being corrected. Punished for, for—”

“For Mitch?” he says. “For my brother’s . . . out of some kind of, of cosmic readjustment?”

Carole nods as if what Will said does in fact add up.

“And what about Luke? What about our little boy? In this line of reasoning, why should it be Luke who pays for the realignment?” Will stops pacing to look at Carole. “I mean, unless you have a whole different moral scale for yourself. Unless the rest of us—me, Sam, your friends, your clients and their, their well-meaning, unenlightened parents—unless we all get measured with the mini moral yardstick, the one for regular mortals and their mini virtues and vices. Is that why you forgive me, Carole? Or why forgiving or not forgiving isn’t even an issue for you? Because you’re on a different plane, a whole other body of water, sailing along smoothly, no waves, no capsizing?”

He stops ranting when he notices the look on Carole’s face. An outrage he’s never seen before—it’s blanched her cheeks and flared her nostrils, so narrowed her usually round eyes that, were he to see this face outside its context, he might not identify it as belonging to anyone he knows. He’s so surprised, so intent on her expression, that he doesn’t even register that she’s seized something from the coffee table, doesn’t see her hurl it at his head. Maybe she should have been the one who coached Little League, he thinks absurdly as he stumbles back and trips over his own feet. Then he’s on the floor, looking at her through a foggy pink veil.

“Oh God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Will. I think I . . . I split open your, your, right above your eyebrow.” She has a wad of paper towels and is pressing them to his head. “I think it needs stitches.”

“Here,” he says. Will uses his own hand to hold the paper towels against his head, pressing harder than she was willing to, to try to stop the bleeding. As he gets to his feet, he sees what it was that hit him, the jar of peanut butter he left on the coffee table when he was talking on the phone with his father, asking him if he was okay with changing their lunch date, seeing each other a week earlier than usual. While talking he’d wandered away from the kitchen, forgotten he was in the middle of making a sandwich. The jar is lying label up, intact. After the Fall is the name of the brand Carole buys, and this strikes him as funny, enough that he starts to laugh.

“Maybe you should start buying Skippy,” he says when he can speak, “in the nice plastic jar. Instead of that organic stuff. Then the next time you throw it at me, this won’t happen.” He’s still laughing, he can’t help it.

“Shit,” she says. “Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry. I’m going to pull the car around. Sam!” she yells. “Samantha! Do you think you can go up and get her, Will?”