I'm Glad About You(82)

“Keep your voice down,” she commanded him. “I won’t have you waking the girls.”

“You won’t have me what?” he asked. “You have betrayed our entire family, and you are telling me, what are you telling me, not to yell?”

“Betrayed, that’s a joke.”

“No, it is NOT.” He managed to land this without breaching the walls of the bedroom, but she was having none of it.

“I’m not talking about this here. I mean it. We should go downstairs, to the kitchen, where—”

“I am not going downstairs and neither are you.” He shut the door and positioned himself in front of it to make this point. “You are not ordering me around like a child, and you are not making me the problem here.”

“Lower your voice.”

“Whose baby are you having, Van? Because we both know it’s not mine.”

“I don’t have to answer that.” She tipped her chin at him defiantly and “drew herself up,” that’s what they used to call it, this phony moment when the person who is the most in the wrong pretends to be taller than she actually is. He watched her mind settle into some far-off place where its righteousness was unassailable. It was astonishing.

“You don’t have to answer that? You don’t answer, to your husband—”

“You were never my husband.”

He had expected some narcissistic retelling of their history, you haven’t been a husband to me since the baby was born, something that completely erased the fact that she was the one who had kicked him out of the marriage bed. But “never”?

“I have no idea what that is supposed to mean,” he informed her. “That is just f*cking crackers.”

“Please refrain from the use of obscenity, it’s highly offensive.” Here we go, he thought, here we go.

“Okay, Van. Great. I won’t say anything. You go right ahead. Explain this situation to me. You are pregnant, yes? You’re showing, so I would like to warn you, as a physician, that a denial at this point won’t do you any good. Because eventually a baby is going to show up. And that’s going to be a challenging thing to explain, if you’re not even pregnant.”

“Babies are not things.”

“No, they’re not; they most certainly are not,” he admitted. “So may we expect a new human being to show up around here, in the next six or seven months? And if that human being does show up, do you want to care to hazard a guess as to why that might happen?”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“‘Cuckold’ is actually the word, but yes, it is widely understood that it makes a man ridiculous, when he is cuckolded.” God he sounded like an ass. How was he losing this argument? He had all the facts on his side, and all that was right and good, and the girls too, his girls, all on his side, he had everything on his side, but she had folded her arms now and was looking at him like he was nothing more than a cheap bully. She was a skilled and devious opponent in an argument; over the years she had taught him the bitter rules of engagement with a will that refused to lose anything at any cost. Okay then. He leaned against the closed door and folded his arms. If you want to do this all night, we will, he thought. He couldn’t tell anymore who was in charge inside his head: bad brain, indifferent brain, victim brain. Was there a good brain anywhere? No. There isn’t.

“I am pregnant. Yes,” Van said, defiant. Why was she defiant? thought one part of his brain. Because she’s a f*cking idiot, another answered. “It is not your child.” No shit. “I think it’s clear that we haven’t been getting along for a long time.” Again, no shit. “I met someone. You don’t need to know who, it doesn’t matter. But he and I, we fell in love, and I’m sorry if this news hurts you, but honestly, it’s been so obvious for so long that our marriage was simply a huge mistake from the start. And I want you to always have a good relationship with your daughters, that is important to me. Maybe more important to me than it is to you, frankly, you don’t seem all that interested in them, most of the time. But that is an unkind thing to say and I really, I never meant to be unkind or unfair in any way. So.”

A pause.

“So?” In spite of the fact that most of his brain was feeling colossally aggrieved, the last shred of his logical mind couldn’t help but want her to finish her f*cking sentence. So what? The lack of apology was maddening. Not the lack of apology, but the crazy conviction that this complete disaster was somehow his fault. And his failure to fall to his knees and beg her for forgiveness was even more reason for her to heap blame on his unworthy head. His many years feeding at the malign teat of gender sensitivity rose in his chest like bile. Those everlasting feminists needed to take a lesson from Van. All that moaning about injustice and patriarchy and victimhood? She could teach them a thing or two about how to avoid that bullshit.

“So I don’t see the need to belabor this,” Van sighed, full of disappointed regret. “I would not have broken up our family in this way,” she informed him. It was a phenomenal performance. “I didn’t choose this.”

“Well, I certainly didn’t choose it!”

“That’s my point, Kyle, neither one of us chose this.”

“And yet only one of us cheated.”

“Is that right?”