She had given me a number of indications that fucked senseless was exactly what she wanted to be. She was an expert flirt. Her gaze was admiring whenever I spoke. Her smile was warm, her perfume intoxicating. She encouraged me to play the mentor with her. I often found myself lecturing her on local zoning policy or whatever, just to get a taste of that gaze, that smile. At first, she flattered me a little. After a while, she flattered me a lot, calibrating her praise to my increasing credulity. And then there was her touch… As the weeks wore on, she would sometimes lay a hand on my forearm when we spoke, or straighten my collar or brush an imaginary piece of lint from my chest. Once she even came up behind me and massaged my shoulders briefly as I was working at my keyboard. And yet… yet she never took that last step. She never propositioned me. She never tried to kiss me, never so much as stood on tiptoe. That last step, with all its risk of rejection and with all its moral responsibility-that she left up to me.
So it gave me a lot to think about. On the one hand, I thought about breaking the heart and losing the trust of the woman I loved; about shattering the idol of my two sons who looked to me for their image of manly strength and integrity; and about disintegrating the emotional universe of my daughter which rested primly, like a ruby on a turtle's shell, atop her parents' affection for each other. On the other hand, I thought about twenty golden minutes with Tanya, with the youth and heat of her flesh against my flesh. Twenty yahoo-screaming minutes with those glossed lips parting to gasp at the force of my urgent entry, until our mutual climax which, who knows, might never end, might never dump me from its height into the black tar pit of shame and remorse. My family or Tanya. It was a tough choice to make.
Maybe women will call me shallow for saying that, but that's women for you. Men wrestle with these matters at a deeper level than women know. In the end, though, a deal is a deal. Cathy had lived up to her part of it. She'd been a full-time mother, a dedicated homemaker, a wife of endless tenderness and surrender. I adored her. And-yes-a deal's a deal.
So bye-bye, what's-your-name-Tanya-bye-bye. I avoided her for the rest of the summer. No more of her quick, gentle touches. No more imaginary lint on my chest, no more massages. And hold the flattery, thanks, just go type up the application forms and get me a cup of coffee while you're at it.
She ended up sleeping with Stan Halsey instead. He was one of our environmental-impact experts, a thirty-five-year-old idealist with a social-worker wife and a brand-new baby girl. By the time Tanya went back to college, Stan was living in a motel, trying to grovel his way out of a separation. All the same, he was a lucky schmuck for those twenty minutes, I had to admit.
Well, it's a world of choices, that's the thing. I'd always have my fantasies. Plus I still had my wife.
And that's what I was musing about when the whole thing started. Sitting on the cushioned chair, on the brick patio, watching my kids play in the backyard.
At some point then, the wife in question brought me a glass of lemonade and kissed me.
"What the hell is this game anyway?" I asked her, tilting the glass toward the kids on the lawn. "I mean, they never actually seem to play it. They've just been making up the rules for the past half hour."
"I think that is the game," Cathy said. She sat down in the chair next to me, one leg tucked up under her.
I sipped my lemonade. "Strange creatures."
"Our children?"
"You think if we put them in cages out front, people'd pay a dollar a pop to see them?"
"If we include the Cavanaughs' kids, they'd probably pay us a dollar just for putting them in cages."
I laughed. "The get-rich-quick scheme we've been looking for."
"Has anyone ever told you that you have the nicest laugh in the world?" Cathy said. "I love that about you. The way you laugh all the time."
"Ah, you're just saying that to get me to have sex with you."
"Speaking of which, the kids are all going over to the Matthews house later for pizza and a video. We should have a couple of hours to ourselves."
"I'm going to run you to ground like a cheetah running down a deer."
"Ooh," she said.
"Like a panther. I may even wear my panther costume."
"You know your panther costume drives me wild."
We held hands and drank lemonade and watched our children for a while in companionable silence.
That, in brief, was my life before the End of Civilization as We Know It. And I loved it. I loved her, Cathy, and to hell with all the Tanyas of the world, let them go. I loved our children. I loved our neighborhood, Horizon Hill, the Hill for short. Big yards, Craftsman houses, lake views. Friendly, mostly like-minded people, hardworking dads, housewife moms, not too many divorces, lots of kids. Most of us were white and Christian, I guess, but we had a good number of Jews mixed in and a few blacks as well. In fact, I think we were a little overfond of them-our Jews and blacks-a little overfriendly to them sometimes because we wanted them to know they were part of the gang, that it was our values that made us what we were, not the other stuff. It was a place of goodwill-that's what I'm saying. I was very happy on the Hill.
Now, after a few moments, Cathy spoke again. It was the last thing she said to me before the phone rang, before the lies and the violence and all the craziness started.
She said, "Have you decided yet what you're going to do about the house?"
It was my mother's house she was talking about. My mother-my poor old crazy mother-had finally died about eight months before. Her will had just cleared probate, and now her house had to be sold so my brother and I could split the money. Someone had to go back east and clean the place out and arrange to put it on the market. Cathy's question: Was I going to go now, or wait for my brother to turn up so he could help me?
We'll never know what I would've answered. Even I don't know. Just then, the phone rang inside the house.
"I'll get it," I said.
My children's voices, the sough and birdsong of the world outside, were muffled as the sliding glass patio door whisked and thudded shut behind me. I walked two steps across our back room, our family room, to where the phone sat beside the stereo. I picked up the handset before the third ring.
"Hello?"
"Is this Jason Harrow?" It was a woman, a voice I didn't recognize.
"Yes?"
I heard her give a quick breath, a sort of bitter laugh. "It's funny to hear you talk after all this time."
"I'm sorry. Who is this?" I still didn't know. My mind was racing, trying to figure it out.
"This is Lauren Wilmont," she said. "Formerly Lauren Goldberg. Formerly your girlfriend, if that's what I was."
It was a strange feeling. Standing there with the phone in my hand, with the family room around me and that voice I barely remembered speaking in my ear. My eyes flitted over the sofa and the stuffed chair; over the rug that was a blended tweed so it would hide juice stains and pizza and soda stains. There was a 36-inch flat-screen Sony TV in one corner. Shelves with board games stacked on them; Monopoly, Pictionary, Clue. Some of Nathan's cars and a couple of Terry's dolls were lying around. Outside, through the glass doors, I could see the tops of the kids' heads moving at the bottom of the slope of the backyard. I saw Cathy, in the foreground, turning in her chair, pointing a finger at her chest and raising her eyebrows to ask: Is the call for me? I smiled thinly. I shook my head no.
And all the while that voice on the phone was talking on:
"You have to come back east, Jason. You have to help me. Please. Come back. I need you."