Ellen had made French toast for breakfast, and fresh-squeezed orange juice and corned beef hash. I hovered at the edge of the speckled Formica table, looking at all the food. I hadn’t made breakfast in years. Nicholas left at four-thirty in the morning; there wasn’t time for a spread like this. “When do you have to get up to do all this?” I asked.
Jake curled his arm around Ellen’s waist. “Tell her the truth,” he said, and then he looked up at me. “Breakfast is all Ellen can do. My mother had to teach her how to turn on the oven when we got married.”
“Jake!” Ellen slapped his hand away, but she was smiling. She slipped a piece of French toast onto a plate for me. “I told him he’s more than welcome to move back home, but then he’d have to do his own laundry again.”
I was mesmerized by them. They made it look so easy. I could not remember the last time there had been a gentle touch or a relaxed conversation between Nicholas and me. I couldn’t remember if Nicholas and I had ever been like this. Things had happened so quickly for us, it was as though our whole relationship had been fast-forwarded. I wondered for a moment what might have happened if I had married Jake. I pushed that thought away. I had given my life to Nicholas, and we could have been like this, I knew we could, if Nicholas had been around just a little more. Or if I had given him something to stick around for.
I watched Jake pull Ellen onto his lap and kiss her senseless, as if I weren’t even there. He caught my eye. “Flea,” he said, grinning, “you aren’t going to watch, are you?”
“For God’s sake,” I said, smiling back at Jake. “What’s a girl got to do to get breakfast in this house?” I stood up and opened the refrigerator, looking for the maple syrup. I watched Jake and Ellen from behind the door. I saw their tongues meet. I promise you this, Nicholas, I thought. Once I get my act together, I’m going to make it up to you. I’m going to fall in love with you all over again. I’m going to make you fall in love with me.
Ellen left for work minutes later, without eating anything she’d prepared. She worked for an advertising agency downtown, in Relocation. “When people move to different branches in the country,” she had said, “I get them started all over again.” She draped a long multicolored scarf over her shoulders and kissed Jake on the neck and waved to me.
Over the next two days, Jake and I went food shopping together, ate lunch together, watched the evening news. I spent all day with him, waiting to hear from Eddie Savoy. At seven o‘clock, when Ellen came home, I would get up off her sofa and turn Jake over to her. I’d drive home to my father’s, sometimes pulling off into a dark, rustling alley to imagine what they were doing.
The third day I was in Chicago, the temperature soared to one hundred degrees. “Get yourself to the lake,” the morning radio DJ said when I was on my way over to Jake’s place. When I opened his door, he was standing in the middle of the living room in his boxer shorts, packing a wicker basket. “It’s a picnic kind of day,” he said, and he held up an orange Tupperware bowl. “Ellen made three-bean salad,” he told me, “and she left you a bathing suit to borrow.”
I tried on Ellen’s bathing suit, feeling very uncomfortable in the bedroom where Jake slept with his wife. There was nothing on the white walls except the old sampler that had hung over Jake’s childhood bed, with the Irish blessing that he had left in my knapsack when I walked away from my life. Most of the room was taken up by an enormous four-poster bed, carved out of golden oak. Each post depicted a different scene from the Garden of Eden: Adam and Eve in a gentle embrace; Eve biting into the forbidden fruit; the Fall from Grace. The serpent wound itself over the fourth post, which I was using to balance myself as I stepped into Ellen’s maillot. I looked into the mirror and smoothed my hands over the places where my bust did not fill up the cups and where the material strained at my waist, thicker because of Max. I wasn’t the slightest bit like Ellen.
In the corner of the mirror I saw Jake come to stand in the doorway. His eyes lingered on my hands as I traced them over my body, lost and unnatural in his wife’s clothing. Then he looked up and held my reflection, as if he was trying to say something but could not find the words. I turned away to break the spell, and put my hand on the serpent’s carved neck. “This is some bed,” I said.
Jake laughed. “Ellen’s mom gave it to us as a wedding gift. She hates me. I think this was her way of telling me to go to hell.” He walked to a chipped armoire in the corner of the room and took out a T-shirt, tossing it to me. It hung to the middle of my thighs. “You all set?” he said, but he was already leaving.
Jake and I parked in the lot for a private golf club and walked beneath the highway overpass to the shores of Lake Michigan. He had pulled the wicker basket and a cooler of be th‘€†er out of the trunk, and as I was about to lock it up, I pulled out my sketch pad and conté sticks on impulse.
In early July, the lake was still cold, but the humidity and the heat rolling off its surface softened the shock of wading in. My ankles throbbed and then little by little became numb. Jake splashed by me, diving in headfirst. He surfaced about six feet away and tossed his hair, spraying me with tiny iced drops that made my breath catch. “You’re a wimp, Flea,” he said. “You move out East and look what happens.”
I thought about Memorial Day the year before, when it was unseasonably hot and I had begged Nicholas to take me to the beach in Newburyport. I’d waded into the water, ready to swim. The ocean was no more than fifty degrees, and Nicholas had laughed and said it never gets swimmable until the end of August. He’d practically carried me back up the beach, and then he held his warm hands over my ankles until my teeth stopped chattering.
Jake and I were the only ones on the beach, because it was barely nine in the morning. We had the whole lake to ourselves. Jake did the butterfly and then the backstroke, and he purposely came close so that he’d splash me. “I think you should move back here permanently,” he said. “What the hell. Maybe I’ll just never go back to work.”
I sank into the water. “Isn’t that the beauty of being the owner, though? You can delegate responsibility and walk away and still make a profit.”
Jake dove under and stayed there for so long I began to get worried. “Jake,” I whispered. I splashed around with my hands to clear the deep water. “Jake!”
He grabbed my foot and pulled hard, and I didn’t even have a chance to take a breath before I went under.
I came to the surface, sputtering and shivering, and Jake smiled at me from several feet away. “I’m going to kill you,” I said.
Jake dipped his lips to the water and then stood up and spurted a fountain. “You could,” he said, “but then you’d have to get wet again.” He turned and started to swim farther away from the shore. I took a deep breath and went after him. He had always been a better swimmer; I was out of breath by the time I reached him. Gasping, I grabbed at his bathing suit and then at the slippery skin of his back. Jake treaded water with one hand and held me under the armpit with the other. He was winded too. “Are you okay?” he said, running his eyes over my face and the cords of my neck.
I nodded; I couldn’t really speak. Jake supported both of us until my breathing came slow and even. I looked down at his hand. His thumb was pressed so tightly against my skin that I knew it would leave a mark. The straps of Ellen’s bathing suit, too long to begin with, had fallen off my shoulders, and the fabric sagged, leaving a clear line of vision down my chest. Jake pulled me closer, scissor-kicking between my own legs, and he kissed me.