Writers & Lovers(64)

‘You weren’t in the driveway!’ He lifts them up easily, one on each hip.

‘We didn’t see the lights,’ John says.

‘I flashed them.’

Oscar told me once that the only good thing about these trips is flashing his headlights as he pulls in and watching the boys run past the windows and out the door to the driveway, their little bodies bright and glowing against the asphalt. But I have forgotten that. He sees Robinson Crusoe in my hand. ‘You’ve been reading it without me?’

‘We can read it over,’ John says. ‘We didn’t understand it all. We can start where we left off on Thursday.’

Oscar puts them down and takes off his coat and hangs it in the closet. He rests a palm on each of their heads. ‘What else did I miss?’

They shout out our activities and he nods, bent down toward them. He hasn’t looked at me yet.

‘How’d it go?’ I say when I can’t bear it any longer.

He doesn’t look up. ‘Good.’

‘We made lasagna, Papa! A real lasagna.’

The boys drag him to the counter to look.

We set the table with plates John had chosen from a high shelf. Jasper drew designs on the paper napkins. We didn’t have flowers so we made a Lego centerpiece.

‘Can we eat now?’ John asks me.

‘Sure,’ Oscar says.

I sit with them. My body is going haywire. I perch at the edge of my chair. I keep rehearsing words, explanations of why I have to leave, but I don’t say them out loud.

Maybe he met someone in Provo. Maybe he just got some clarity. Maybe the whole weekend, while I was falling in love with his kids, falling in love with this whole life, he was changing his mind.

The boys recount, blow by blow, our two days together. He listens, bent over the lasagna, nodding. None of it pleases him. That’s clear. And they are working so hard to please him, working so hard to be interesting and amusing, to say something he will like. Muriel has said that sometimes she gets to the workshop and he’s just absent. But this is more than absence. This is willful, strategic withdrawal. It seems cruel to inflict it on children.

I get through the meal. I clear the plates. I stand at the sink, my back to the table. I know I should stay, help with the dishes, wait for the boys to go to bed, and talk to him. But I can’t. I have to leave. I go upstairs and put my clothes and toilet kit back in my bag and come down again.

‘You’re leaving?’ Jasper says.

I squat down and give him a hug. I grab John’s arm and pull him in. ‘I had so much fun with you two this weekend.’

‘Bye-bye, poppet,’ Jasper says. It was from Mrs. Doubtfire.

I give Oscar a little wave and turn away.

My bike’s in the garage, and when I wheel it out he’s waiting for me.

‘Where are you going?’ He grabs my handlebars and puts the front wheel between his legs so he’s facing me and very close. ‘Please don’t leave mad. I’m sorry. Whatever I’ve done I’m sorry.’

‘Whatever you’ve done?’

‘Being remote, cold, whatever.’ He says it like it’s an old and tired accusation, like we’ve been here many times before, in this boring cliché of an argument. ‘I get jealous. I always have. When Sonya was dying, I knew everyone wished it were me.’

‘Of course they didn’t.’

‘Of course they did. She was their mother. I was the dispensable one, the jerk who was always trying to get more time alone with his work. But there was this moment toward the end when I was hugging them on this terrible chair in her hospital room and I felt them turn fully toward me, like they knew it was over and it was just the three of us. It was awful and terrifying and heartbreaking, but it was exhilarating, too. I finally had their full attention.’ He reaches out for my hand. I give it to him, and he pulls me in. He slides inside my shirt and puts his finger in my belly button. ‘I like having people’s full attention.’ He kisses me. He circles my bare waist with his hands. ‘So, I had some free time in Provo and I went to the library and happened to read an excellent story in the Kenyon Review.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘I wrote that a long time ago.’ I wrote it when my mother was alive.

‘I had no idea you were so good.’ He shakes me.

‘Back in the eighties.’

Inside the house the boys have put the movie on again.

‘We watched Mrs. Doubtfire.’

‘PG-13 Mrs. Doubtfire?’

‘They may have some questions.’

When we stop kissing, he puts my helmet on my head and fastens it under my chin, threading his fingers between my skin and the plastic so it doesn’t pinch me.

‘Give them a hug for me.’

‘You already did.’

‘Give them another.’

He waits for me to explain, but I can’t. I’m not sure what I mean, either.





Muriel tells me she gave my number to her sister who has a friend who teaches at a school that has just fired their English teacher.

‘High schools give me the creeps.’

‘It’s a cool place. Something like eighty percent of the students receive financial aid. Not your typical private school. The whole summer off to write.’