15
We don’t see each other again during the holidays. We can’t. I call him once, the next night, tell him that Gracie knows, that she heard us (I don’t mention that she saw us), that we have to stop for a while. He says he doesn’t want to stop, he wants to come over now, he misses me. He starts to cry. I know I’m failing him, he feels abandoned, discarded, lost. At the same moment Gracie moans from the bedroom, “Mommy?” I know the sound, she’s had a bad dream. “Connor, I have to go, we’ll see each other at school, we’ll talk, I swear we’ll talk, I have to go.”
I hang up, sick with guilt, run to Gracie’s room, hold her, tell her everything’s all right. While I’m comforting her the phone rings. It rings four times and then stops. The machine is picking it up, I know. A minute later it rings again, four times. Then silence. After that it stops. I get Gracie back to sleep and step into the kitchen where the little red light is blinking on the machine, but nothing has been recorded except a hissing silence. I delete the wordless messages, switch the ringer on the phone to off. It feels like I’m switching off the life support system for him, for the one I love more than anyone, more than life itself. I grit my teeth, try to keep from crying, force myself to not pick up the phone and call him again as I so desperately want to, beg him in my mind not to call here again tonight. He doesn’t.
I’m edgy all the time now. Bill returns and I wonder if he’ll find it as easy to detect what’s going on as my four-year-old daughter did. But no, poor gullible Bill doesn’t have the slightest idea. I worry what Gracie might blurt out at the dinner table some evening, but realize that Bill would never believe it anyway. Mommy and that boy who shovels the snow took their clothes off and played grown-up games on the floor in the living room one night. I saw them. His wife brought her eleven-year-old student into the house and fucked him on the living room carpet and was so unaware of anything that she didn’t realize her daughter had awakened, gotten out of bed and was watching them? Ridiculous. There’s never been a hint of anything untoward about his wife, not one single thing in ten years, and now this? He’d think it was like the McMartin Preschool case years ago, when children were encouraged to tell tales of orgies and devil worshipping going on in their classes. Those manipulated children were believed, for a while. But no one would believe Gracie’s story about Mommy, Ms. Straw, Mo-na, certainly not Bill, dear Bill, trusting Bill with his much younger wife who he believes could never betray him. Bill, who has lost most of his illusions over the years but not the one about Mona, perfect little Mona. You just had a dream, honey.
When I’m with Bill at night I start things sexually now. Even as I feel nauseous and hysterical, keep my eyes closed, my mind far away, I’m enthusiastic in bed, creative, fun. It’s my way of apologizing to him. I pretend that I’ve sat down with him and confessed everything, every single thing I’ve done, and he’s taken me in his arms and told me he forgives me and that we’ll speak no more of it, darling. Yes, he’s forgiven me, in his heart he has, in his heart he knows something’s wrong but he forgives me because he’s always forgiven me everything and I love him for it, I love him even as I can’t stand him anymore, his sagging jowls, his listless attempts at lovemaking. He can barely manage to finish sexually once and then can’t get it up again for days. It’s pathetically easy to please him in bed, to exhaust him. It takes only minutes. Bill’s fifty but looks fifty-five, acts sixty. I can’t live like this. But I must live like this.
And so when the school year starts again Connor and I go to motels.
It isn’t easy. It’s hard to even find time to talk to him about it, furtive whispers in the few minutes no one else is in the room at the end of fourth period. I’ve stopped the lunchtime movie watching, told Connor he must go play with the other kids, we don’t dare let anyone start to imagine there’s anything between us. He sulks but understands. The after-school tutoring group continues but I’m careful to show Connor no more attention than Lauren or Richard or Kylie or any of the kids who appear for extra help. Once when he’s sitting beside me getting directions on how to do a math problem he moves his hand, which is hidden from the others by my big teacher’s desk, onto my own. I pull my hand away as if he’d spat on it, shoot him a fierce look. He doesn’t do it again. Instead we arrange that I’ll pick him up on this corner, that corner, the middle of such-and-such block. Always different pick-up points, in different directions, as far away as I can reasonably expect him to be able to walk. I find a new day care for Gracie just across the street from the old one which will keep her an hour longer than the other. If I rush out of school at the end of the day, drive aimlessly for a few minutes or pick up a few groceries and then go pick up Connor wherever he is, take him to wherever we’re going, spend an hour with him there, I can still be back before the day care closes and before Bill’s home. But it’s difficult, looking up all these cheap motels so I know where to drive us and don’t waste any of the time we have together. The Sleepy Bear Lodge, the Skyview Inn, Motel 6, Super 8, all in Maryland, northern Virginia, D.C. itself. We never use the subway; I feel safer and more in control driving my car, and anyway we need places sufficiently out of the way that there’s no Metro stop for them. The first few times I have him hide in the vehicle and check in as a single, but then decide we’re more liable to attract attention by getting caught at that than if I simply sign us in as a party of two, mother and son: “Just passing through. My boy is in the car.” Connor stays in the car always, never meets anyone at these run-down places. Two beds are in the room when I sign us in as two and they’re smaller but it’s better, we’re not breaking any motel rules, not sneaking in any unpaid guests. We’re honest and respectable. I use a different name each time, of course. I pay cash, of course. Even that’s difficult. I have my own bank account along with Bill’s and my various joint ones, but it’s not terribly large and dropping fifty or sixty dollars a couple of times a week on motel rooms quickly adds up. But the thing I fear most, that’s in the back of my mind always, is if I were to walk into the office of a motel and find behind the counter someone I know. But we generally drive ten or twenty miles out of Silver Spring and I know no one who works in any motel, anyway. And I do have a story prepared. The room isn’t for me, it’s for a friend coming in from out of town tonight. I would make the reservation, tell them to expect my friend later that evening. The friend would never show. Connor and I would drive back home.
At first Connor is tremendously excited simply to see different motel rooms. He’s hardly ever stayed in a motel, he says. “Just once, when my dad took me to a baseball game in Boston. I was really little.” He’s interested in the ice machines outside, the little cakes of soap in their paper wrappers, the toilet paper folded just so on the roll, the towels, the TVs. (“Hey, Mona!”—he’s growing more comfortable with my name—“look, they have HBO!”) But soon enough (“We don’t have much time, Connor, sweetheart”), I have him choose which bed we’ll use. Each time I teach him patiently how to slow down, how to be a partner, a lover, rather than an overexcited boy. He learns quickly. He’s wonderful, wonderful beyond words. But soon, terribly soon it’s over, each time it’s over, I look at my watch and realize that if I’m going to get back in time to pick up Gracie we have to go in the next half-hour, twenty minutes, ten minutes.