All Adults Here(39)
“Okay, I can see that,” Jeremy said. “You look so beautiful, Porter. Goddamn. I mean it. Does that mean I can skip the condom?”
Porter thought about it. “Yes, just stick it in, do it, before I change my mind and ask you too many questions.”
Jeremy didn’t have to be asked twice. The rag rug in the kitchen felt good against her back, but then she remembered the baby and rolled Jeremy over so that she was on top. She came in minutes, and Jeremy quivered under her. Porter lifted a knee and he rolled away and then carried her over to the sofa, where he laid her back and went down on her with such mastery that she laughed.
“You are fucking efficient,” Porter said. “I’m sorry that I’m pregnant, if that’s weird. I mean, I’m not sorry that I’m pregnant, I’m happy that I’m pregnant. I just mean that I’m sorry I didn’t officially tell you before I took my clothes off.”
“Being pregnant is nine months without a baby. It’s cool.” He’d done this before, of course. It was both comforting and disconcerting to remember that Jeremy had had sex with a pregnant woman before. Marriage was something that Porter didn’t quite understand, a fact for which she blamed her mother. Or rather, she blamed her father’s death, and then her mother’s ease with being alone. Her father had died before she’d moved out of the solipsistic period of youth, when parents existed only in relation to their children, not to each other. They’d been so close to the empty nest, her parents, and to whatever phase would come next. Porter felt sorry for her mother, for the very first time—Astrid would be horrified, maybe even more horrified than she would be about what Porter had just done on the Fogelmans’ kitchen floor.
For her whole life, Porter had imagined she’d have a marriage just like her parents—fine. They fought but only sometimes. They were affectionate but only sometimes. They rolled their eyes at the dinner table and saved their big arguments for when the kids were out of earshot. That seemed like the goal—another person to help manage the logistics of a full, busy life, someone whose face you liked, someone you could live with for fifty years without throwing each other out the window. Nicky made marriage look like an art project, and Elliot made it look like prison. Porter could count on one hand the number of married couples whose relationships she actually coveted, and most of them were famous people (Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, Barack and Michelle Obama), so who knew what was really happening behind closed doors.
She looked at Jeremy and tried to remember why she hadn’t wanted to marry him when she was twenty. She was too young, that was all. What a fucking ridiculous choice, what hubris! To think that there would be an unlimited number of willing suitors, like on The Bachelor, an endless line of men stepping out of a clown car limousine. Porter hadn’t seen Jeremy’s bedroom and so she just pictured his teenage bedroom at the top of the stairs of his adult house, the posters of Patrick Ewing and Pamela Anderson at her Baywatch best. His children—full-size humans with enormous backpacks and orthodontist appointments—didn’t matter to her. They were something else entirely, as remote a concept as having been born a boy, or with three eyeballs. His wife wasn’t there, and Porter banished her to the outer limits of her psychic galaxy. There was only so much room inside her body. Pregnancy was so bizarre, so full of unanticipated effects and side effects and side-side effects that Porter felt both connected to every woman who had ever lived and also like she were the first person on earth who this had happened to.
“So why did you come to see me?” Jeremy asked, his head half buried under the blanket over her lap. “I fucking missed you, Porter.”
Porter petted Jeremy’s neck, following its smooth curve down his spine. “I missed you too.” The dog—it was called Ginger, she remembered—woke up and ambled over, pressing her wet nose into Porter’s palm. She closed her eyes and pretended it all belonged to her: the dog, the house, the boy. Maybe it still could. It was delusional, she knew, but Porter also knew that this was her last chance at delusion. Soon she would have to shape up, to get her head on straight, to set limits on candy and screen time and curfews and whatever evil thing came down the pike that no one had even heard of yet. Right now, she was still just herself, just one person, with no one to answer to. And so if she wanted to fuck her ex on his kitchen floor, she was going to. Porter didn’t believe that everything happened for a reason—that was absurd—but she did believe that one thing led to the next. Her mom had fallen in love with no consideration of the consequences, Porter had run into her old best friend, and all that had led her to Jeremy’s office, and then his car had led her to his house, and then their bodies had come back together in the way they had always, always done so well, that had led them here, to this moment, which felt like a beginning or at least the opening of a door.
When Jeremy drove them back to his office, and Porter got back into her car to go home, she put her forehead against the steering wheel and cried. She was happy. Doing stupid things didn’t have to be wasted on the young.
Chapter 17
Wendy Wakes Up
It was 12:30 P.M., which meant that Wendy had just begun to enjoy two full hours of silence. The boys were freshly three, and she knew they wouldn’t nap forever, and maybe shouldn’t even still be napping now, seeing as they woke up at five A.M., but Wendy would rather be up before dawn and get a break in the middle of the day. Next year, they would be in school, and they would be someone else’s problem, then they could stop napping. Oh, how Wendy hated her friends who had daughters, dutiful little creatures who could sit quietly at a table with nothing more than a piece of paper and a cupful of colored pencils. If her children were awake, they were running at top speed, screaming like Mel Gibson in Braveheart. She wore earplugs when the pitch got too high, which was often. She now hid pillboxes of earplugs in nearly every room of the house, like an addict hiding their stash.