I'm Glad About You(15)

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SIX MONTHS LATER they were engaged. It wasn’t a shotgun situation; the weekend of f*cking out in the middle of Lake Erie had passed by without sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy, but what it had set in motion was irrevocable nonetheless.

The passing months had only proven to Van what she had sensed from the beginning—that Kyle was one man among millions and she would never find another to match him for intelligence, grace, and steadiness. With him in the palm of her hand she felt herself balanced uncertainly on a tightrope. She actually didn’t want to be some liberated feminist who insisted on having a career in addition to marriage and children, that sounded like a lot of work and for what? The law? She didn’t have any passion for the law, finally; the only thing in her life, she felt, that she had ever had a passion for was Kyle. And now she was running around to one interview after another fiercely explaining to everyone why they should hire her for jobs that were boring and didn’t pay enough. For months she and Kyle carefully discussed what her options were, what offer was the one she was most passionate about, which might lead to the ideal job, how long they might have to be separated if she took the children’s advocate position she had been offered in Pittsburgh, how much commuting would be possible on weekends between Cleveland and Pittsburgh or maybe Cincinnati, if that was where she ended up. She tried to stay focused and discuss these choices rationally but there were so many levels of internal deception involved she couldn’t keep track of who should or did care about what. She became dull and evasive. Finally when he asked her what was wrong she burst into tears. The make-up sex was mind-blowing.

And so they decided to move to Cincinnati, where she could become a junior associate litigator and he could do his residency in a major pediatrics partnership in an affluent suburb. Once they had untangled the solution from the endless parade of questions, their sense of relief carried them giddily through planning the wedding, buying dresses, introducing families to each other, and dreaming about their future together. They drove back and forth between Cincinnati and Cleveland dozens of times, looking for the right apartment which would be both cozy and affordable—although both of them would be making a decent wage, they both had substantial student loans to manage. In no time the marriage and the move were accomplished, the apartment was furnished, and the new jobs begun. In spite of obstacles others might have considered significant, Kyle and Van had gotten themselves transitioned into a whole new life without so much as a significant pause.

The one fly in the ointment, of course, was Alison. Kyle would have loved to rub it in her face how effectively he had moved on, but she had made no effort to contact him and he would not be the one to break the silence between them. He suspected that the few friends who were still in touch with her would be filling her in on every detail of his whirlwind marriage and that suspicion provided his heart with the occasional stab of glee. Unfortunately, this was not quite as true for Van. With her easy blonde grace and charm, she was used to having the field to herself without acknowledging even the breath of competition from other women. So no matter how distant her rival was in this situation, the mere fact of Alison’s presence—her significant presence—in Kyle’s past was an unacceptable irritant.

“So Alison Moore is on television tonight,” she noted to Susan, pretending to be cheerfully interested and uninterested at the same time. They had moved past the wine pouring and on to the serving of dinner, a lovely pecan-crusted chicken cutlet with a humble mustard-and-mayonnaise sauce. “Can we watch it? Everybody says she’s terrific and I’ve never seen her!” Susan didn’t immediately respond. She seemed absorbed by the culinary necessity of moving the chicken onto the plates and then doling out portions of the sauce fairly. So Van’s cheery question hung in the air a second longer than it should have done.

“What show is it? Law and Order?” his father asked Kyle, as if he were the one who had mentioned it in the first place.

“I don’t know,” Kyle shrugged. “Susan was the one who heard about it, not me.”

“It’s one of those crime shows, I can’t remember the title,” Susan admitted with a sudden unwillingness to share the rest of the details. “Eleanor just said her mom said they were real excited. She thought I maybe had heard about it already.”

“Why would you hear about it?” asked Van, a little arch, like this was a stupid thing for other people to assume.

“Cincinnati is still kind of a small town. A local actress on a big network television show, people get excited, although you’re right, it’s not that big a deal.”

“Well, is it a big part?” Van asked. Her brittle tone had gone on for really too long now. She was, after all, the one who was keeping this horrific subject alive; it seemed unfair that she would also be so patently annoyed by it.

“Apparently it is a pretty big part, that’s what I’m told,” Susan responded, the breath of annoyance entering from her side now. Van’s bright femininity most definitely had an edge, which someone like Susan was never going to particularly forgive. A nurse, she dealt daily with people who were in a lot of pain, and she didn’t like a lot of foolish small talk. Not that Van was a fool. But she was, to Susan, an exquisite annoyance. Susan had a long plain face and a sturdy build, and she worried about being left alone in the world. It galled her that her handsome brother, who could have had his pick of any girl out there, went for this, whatever she was. It also galled her that this Van had clearly gotten Kyle to have sex with her and that his idiotic dedication to their parents’ mid-fifties version of Catholicism had doomed him. Susan felt her life moving through her like a curse.