All Adults Here(37)
“I have goats,” Porter said. “Do you do goats?”
Jeremy laughed, which was generous. Once you decided someone was funny, you were likely to laugh at any old thing they said. “Sure. You see Dr. Gordon, over at Clapham Animal, right?” He knew where she went, of course. He was agreeing to be an actor in her play, curious about where she was going with it. Jeremy crossed his arms over his chest. He was wearing a button-down shirt tucked into his jeans. Rachel was right—he looked like an ice-cream cone, a hundred percent lickable, just as he always had been. She felt everything at once: the way his breath had always smelled like scrambled eggs on the school bus; the way he held her hand while walking down the hall; the way he’d tried to finger her for the first time, nearly slipping his hand in the wrong hole entirely; the way he’d looked at her during his wedding reception and on their last night at the hotel.
Jeremy’s college and Porter’s college hadn’t been so far apart, and in those early days, when they were both still clinging to their youths, when anyone who had known you before seemed preferable to a stranger, they had stayed in touch. There had been brief visits facilitated by Greyhound buses, visits that ended with UTIs from too much sex and hickeys to be covered with makeup. Their encounters were irregular, which is to say at irregular intervals, but they were always mutually satisfying. It was almost better, not being exclusive, not being “together,” because it meant that every time they saw each other, in whatever months had passed between, both Jeremy and Porter had picked up a few new tricks from other people.
“Yeah, I see Dr. Gordon, but I thought, hey, might be time for a change.” Porter wondered if she looked different to him than she had before. “And I was just in the neighborhood, thought I’d say hi.” She could have been saying anything, she could have been speaking gibberish. Right now, Jeremy was trying to figure out why she had come, and what she wanted. Once he did, he would know what to do.
“I was going to get a coffee before I went in; want some coffee?” Jeremy pointed down the block. In the morning sunlight, Jeremy’s brown eyes looked golden. His wife was a blond stay-at-home mom who designed her own art projects with Popsicle sticks and felt. Porter had seen them together too many times to count, but she and Kristen had met only a handful of times: at their five-year high school reunion, before Kristen and Jeremy were married; at their wedding, at which Porter had gotten supremely drunk and danced with all the small children; and only once by accident, when she wasn’t expecting it, at the mall in New Paltz, when they were trying on clothes in neighboring changing rooms at the Gap. Kristen was the kind of woman who murmured sweetly to strangers’ screaming children in elevators, when everyone else turned their eyes toward the ceiling and prayed to be sucked up by a tractor beam from outer space.
“One cup,” Porter said, not meaning it, never meaning it, not with Jeremy, with whom there were no limits. She followed him back around the building, to his car, and when he opened the door to the passenger’s seat, she got in.
“I need to pick something up at home first, is that okay?” Jeremy waited, his hand on the shifter knob.
“Yes,” Porter said, and they were off. She’d never minded a little white lie.
* * *
—
There were several distinct neighborhoods in Clapham: Clapham Village, which contained the commercial stretches and all the homes within a two-mile radius of the roundabout; Clapham Heights, where her mother and Elliot lived, up the hill; Clapham Valley, where she lived, at the bottom of the hill; and then there was Clapham Road, which led out of the valley and into towns south. Jeremy lived halfway between Porter’s house and the farm, and though she had driven by a number of times, and occasionally been invited to large parties there, Porter had never so much as parked in front.
She was pregnant. He was married. It was not a date. Jeremy pulled the car into the garage and shut the door behind them.
“Where is everybody?” Porter asked. She didn’t budge.
“Nobody’s here,” Jeremy said. “Come inside.” He waited for her to get out of the car, and then he walked around to her side of the car and gave her a small, friendly shove toward the door into the house.
She’d seen the inside of his house thousands of times, in photos on Facebook and Instagram, in videos from when his children started walking or when the cat did something funny. She knew what his kitchen island looked like, what color the paint was in the living room, his outdoor furniture. Walking into it felt like walking into a children’s book she’d loved, shocking to have things suddenly three-dimensional.
The house was small and tightly packed: cleats and flip-flops by the door in an overflowing basket, jackets haphazardly flung onto hooks. The living room was lined with bookshelves, with two well-used sofas, one of which held a sleeping dog, the other, a sleeping cat, each curled into donuts. Before Porter made it all the way across the living room and into the kitchen, she knew what she would find there: overflowing bowls of snacks and fruit, a Sharpie’d height chart on the wall. The whole house was a diamond ring.
“So where’s the family?” Porter slid onto a stool at the kitchen counter.
Jeremy shrugged. “A mediocre hotel restaurant with a dozen smelly children, I’m guessing? Soccer tournament, the travel team.”
“Aha,” Porter said. “And you don’t have to be at work right now?”