If You Only Knew(44)

The bartender met my eye, and I stared back. What? What did he want? Oh. He was asking if I needed a refill. I nudged my glass a little closer, and more red wine flowed. He had a tattoo on his wrist. The wine was Yellow Tail. There was a maraschino cherry on the floor, and he was just about to step on it. My legs were shaking.

Dr. Dan was still talking.

“Dorothy?” I interrupted. “Was that her name?”

“Dorothy. Yeah, I think so. Lizzie hated her. Oh, man, Lizzie—remember her?—she and I dated a couple times. She was all right, that Lizzie.”

He kept up in that vein, talking and talking and talking, the subject drifting from his days in COH to his migration south, how he met his wife. I stopped listening. I nodded in the right places, then checked my watch and pretended my flight was boarding in ten minutes. Kissed him on the cheek, thanked him for the wine and left.

Dorothy.

I could see her face as if she’d been standing in front of me. Blond hair, black roots, that full-lipped mouth. Blue eyes. Big nose, but it worked.

So it was true after all. My father had indeed been kissing Dorothy. In fact, he’d had an affair.

I was so glad when he gave up that woman.

That didn’t even sound like a one-night stand.

A middle-aged man, confronted with his fading youth in the face of Dr. Dan, a wife who’s suddenly in love with her career, two daughters who didn’t leap into his arms at night anymore...and a damsel in distress in the form of a single mom who struggled to pay the bills.

I remembered Mom’s flashes of jealousy, her easy dismissal of Dorothy’s problems. But I also knew Mom well enough to understand that if she had known Dad was sleeping with someone else, she’d never have been able to hide it.

Mom didn’t know.

Rachel didn’t know.

Six hours later, my flight really did board, and I fell into a coma-like sleep the second we taxied down the snowy runway. When I woke up somewhere over the Pacific, I was resolved.

I’d never tell. It was too late.

The hot chocolate and madeleines hadn’t fooled me back then, that rainy day when I was eleven. I had known. I gave him the benefit of the doubt that night when I decided I’d imagined the whole thing, and I was wrong to do it. For the past twelve years, I’d been pretending Dad wasn’t the cheater he was.

I should’ve told Mom when there was still time. She could’ve confronted him. Gotten counseling. Could’ve divorced him. She could’ve separated, at least, and when he died, she at least might’ve been on the road to some other form of happiness.

And maybe...just maybe, if he’d been the guilty man who had to make amends for his affair, he wouldn’t have gone for that stupid Green Watermelon Brain Freeze. If he’d been living in some pathetic apartment, wondering how he was going to pay alimony and child support, maybe he wouldn’t have stopped to indulge his sweet tooth.

Maybe, if I’d told, he’d be alive today.

Rachel

My STD panel came back clear.

There have been moments in the past two weeks when I’ve been able to forget my husband had an affair. During the days when the girls don’t have school, for example, when we’re elbow-deep in organic clay or paint or dirt, I forget.

I dug out part of the backyard to make the girls their own garden, and they’re so beautiful out there that I take dozens of pictures... Grace sprinkling the pink impatiens with one of the three tiny watering cans we painted; Rose, laughing and filthy, clutching a seedling in each fist; Charlotte lying in the dirt, singing to her “pupple plant.” I’ll mat and frame a photo of each girl, and hang the photos in their room. My love for them still fills me with such light and joy my feet almost leave the ground sometimes, and when they snuggle against me, or pick me a flower or leaf, when they draw a picture of me with a big red slash of a smile, I know who I am.

Everywhere else, though, I’m muddled. Three weeks ago, I was a happy, happy wife in love with her husband. Now, hatred flashes like corrosive acid, spurting out of me at the very thought or sight of Adam. I hate myself as well, that stupid, happy woman who thought that making inventive dinners and wearing pretty clothes would keep this wolf from my door. I never knew I had hate like this in me, and it horrifies me, a consuming monster that leaps and claws at the love I had for him, and for us.

And then sometimes he’ll just call to see if I need anything before he comes home, and I forget that he had sex with someone else, and I love him again. Until I remember.

I’ve called the Tribeca Grand four times this week. The poor woman at the reservations desk is starting to smell a fake, I’m pretty sure, but she’s been so kind, as if she knows exactly who I am and how I’ll never stay in a hotel like that, certainly not on my own. I’ve noticed they’ve updated the pictures. There’s a bar in the suite, and in the lobby, for that matter. A long curving couch with pink pillows. That ocean-size white bed. What would I do there? Sit? Cry? Drink pinot grigio and watch Say Yes to the Dress?

I bet Emmanuelle would be right at home in that suite.

In the past seventeen days, I’ve read dozens of articles about infidelity, and we all have the same question, we stupid wives: What does she have that I don’t?

In Emmanuelle’s case, the answer is pretty clear. Confidence. Style. Amorality. A Brazilian.

I can’t think of her. Just can’t go there without the rage monster clawing its way right through my rib cage.