You Think It, I'll Say It(9)
Graham did a variation on this. He said, interrupting her, “Julie—no—I don’t think—” They both were silent for a few confusing but probably terrible seconds. “I don’t—” Graham said, then paused again, then said, “You and Keith seem like you have a good marriage, and God knows how rare those are. That’s not something to trifle with.”
She shouldn’t have offered a counterargument, right? But she said, “I think about you all the time. I feel a way I haven’t felt since I was a teenager.”
“Keith is my co-worker, Julie. And with our kids and school—” They made excruciating eye contact, and Graham said, “It’s a nonstarter.”
“Do you not feel like we connect in some unusual way?”
He shrugged. “You’re fun to talk to. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything beyond itself.”
Although her internal organs had begun to liquefy and collapse, it seemed important to conceal this from him.
“So,” he said. Another silence ensued, and he added, “An eighty-five-degree day in January, huh? I guess it’s getting pretty hard to dismiss global warming.” Astonishingly, they segued into an ordinary conversation, a conversation that under normal circumstances, with anyone else, would have given her tired face. He had ordered shrimp risotto, and she had ordered salad, and he picked up the check, which seemed unsurprising but still gracious. Also astonishingly, even though the lunch had been worse than she possibly could have imagined, she didn’t wish for it to be over; in spite of everything, she liked being in his presence.
Outside, on the sidewalk, in what was obviously their last minute together, he said in a serious voice, “I want to make sure you know”—and she thought he was about to provide consolation—“that it’s not like I wish we could be together under different circumstances. I was never romantically interested in you. Never. At all.” The sentiment seemed more legalistic than mean, not that the two were mutually exclusive. There was also something legalistic in the way he seemed to be awaiting her acknowledgment.
“Okay,” she said.
“You realize, don’t you, that you weren’t saying what I thought? You were saying what you thought. I was just listening.”
“Okay,” she said again.
Clearly, they couldn’t kiss or hug. He looked at her with trepidation and concern, said, “Take care of yourself,” and patted her shoulder.
She watched him retreat down the block, and when he reached the crosswalk, she reentered the lobby of the Four Seasons, found a bathroom, shut herself in a stall, and bawled.
* * *
—
Twenty days had passed since she and Graham had had lunch, and Julie was, when by herself, still crying frequently. This was why, on the morning of chaperoning the field trip to the Butterfly Center, Julie told Lucas’s teacher that she needed to pick up a prescription and, instead of riding the bus, would meet them there. Because Julie stopped crying when she passed Dunlavy Street, she had enough time to recover and look mostly normal before joining the students, teachers, and other parents (which, of course, meant other mothers).
In the last three weeks, Julie and Graham had had no contact. Though she’d seen him from a distance at the girls’ basketball tournament, they hadn’t spoken; the sight of him across the high school gym had made her realize that in the short term, she would miss him as the person she’d lain awake in the middle of the night imagining being naked with, but in the long term what she’d miss was their conversations.
At the natural science museum, Julie parked on the north side. Like the majority of women she knew, she drove an SUV, hers a black BMW. She pulled off her sunglasses before peering at her face in the mirror on the sun visor. Her eyes were only marginally more bloodshot than usual, and her lips, which sometimes swelled when she cried, were their regular size. She put her sunglasses back on and climbed from the car.
The school buses had discharged their freight, and when she joined the throng on the plaza in front of the museum, the second graders were leaping around and jostling one another. Lucas, along with his best friend, Drew, was climbing on a railing on the steps. She waved, and Lucas, who was the most easygoing of her children, waved back; he didn’t feel the need to either publicly cling to or ignore her. Many times, with other adults, Julie had winkingly referred to Lucas as her oops baby, because of the age gap between him and his sisters, but she didn’t anticipate using the term, with its subtext of sloppy spontaneous marital passion, ever again.
Julie found Mrs. Ackerburg, who was Lucas’s teacher.
“Here’s your group.” Mrs. Ackerburg handed Julie a piece of paper with a typed list of names on it and added, “I’ve paired you with Gayle Nelson.”
Julie hoped her sunglasses concealed her dismay: She hadn’t known that Graham’s wife—or ex-wife, depending on what stage of the divorce proceedings they were in—would be here. Gayle definitely hadn’t been part of the group emails Mrs. Ackerburg had sent. Aloud, Julie said, “Great,” then looked around to locate Gayle. Sure enough, she was standing near her daughter Macy.
Julie pretended she hadn’t seen her and approached Lucas. “Hey, squirt,” she said, and he said, “Hi, Mom.” Lucas was four feet tall, with blond curls.
“We were out of cheddar, so I put Swiss on your sandwich for lunch today,” she said. “Just so you’re not surprised.”