“Who is this?” I asked. Breathing. Nothing.
The caller hung up. I lifted my window shades. The toilet paper still swayed from the trees, and in the moonlight it looked beautiful, like the billowed sails of a ship. I tried not to imagine my life as a horror movie. It could have been anyone—the protesters who’d vandalized my yard or a prank call from a neighborhood kid.
I tried to go back to reading my script. Stella was to be taken to Port Middleton Memorial, where her aunt is dying. Celeste needed a blood transfusion to save her—and Stella was her last hope, the perfect match, but she was severely dehydrated and weak and needed a course of IVs and antibiotics.
The phone rang again, and I ignored it this time, but then I heard the unmistakable beeping from Wyatt’s fax machine in the basement.
I tugged on the pull chain to illuminate the basement stairs. I held on to the rail. Once, I played the role of a middle-aged woman whose laundry machine was haunted, and the final scene was a close-up of her feet descending the stairs. The director—a young guy in his twenties—had wanted to film that scene with me barefoot because he thought it tapped closer to the intimate core of the character and her motivations. “She’s raw,” he said. He described everything as “raw.” I tried to tell him that no woman I knew would go barefoot in an unfinished basement with concrete floors.
My slippers touched the landing. Wyatt’s new apartment was too small for a home office. He’d left behind his desk and word processor, his executive leather chair with steel studs. Propped against the lamp was a picture of us, from a trip we took to the Grand Canyon tocelebrate our five-year anniversary. In that photo, I stood in front of him, his arms wrapped around me like a cardigan tied at the sleeves. Behind us the giant striped craters extend beyond the frame.
I ripped the paper off the fax. I stared at the words.
Does your husband know?
The words seemed to magnify, right there on the paper. My eyes zoomed in. I could see each pixel of ink. If a director were blocking this scene, she’d probably advise I do something external to dramatize my internal dilemma. The outside reflects the inside.Scene work, they call it. I tore at the paper in the fax machine until it was a mess on the floor. I switched off the power button. I crumpled that message in my fist.
Does your husband know?
Before the separation, I had cheated on Wyatt.
I had cheated on Wyatt, and somebody knew.
I wouldn’t quite call this cheating an affair because it involved no romance, just a couch in a green room and another time, another couch. The jokes about the casting couch—I know them well. Couch sex is rarely comfortable. There’s little give for the knees. I’m embarrassed, not because I find couch sex embarrassing but because I find the person with whom I had sex embarrassing.
John Dale Fox. Anchor. Action 13 News.
All my life, I had been a good girl, a rule follower, as obedient as a show dog. If I checked out at the grocery store’s express lane, I made sure I didn’t have a single item over ten, and I did, in fact, count duplicates of the same item. I made dinner every night that included a starch, a meat, and a vegetable—that perfect trifecta before carbohydrates became criminal. I studied my scripts, memorized my lines, even for table readings that didn’t require it.
Back then, I thought the affair was necessary. I’d have blamed Wyatt, and all the ways he’d made me resent him. I’d have blamed the distance between us or the miscarriages or the fact he communicated morewith his coworkers than he did with me, sitting in the basement until late, until after I’d already gone to bed. He was nicer to them, too. I’d have pointed out how when Wyatt got home from work, he’d recline in the living room watching the news, waiting for me to start dinner. And I envied that, really, I did. His stillness, his patience in the face of hunger.
I did Wyatt’s laundry, and I folded his clothes. I vacuumed and dusted and got on my hands and knees scrubbing toilets and tubs and linoleum and baseboards, as my mother had taught me. I did the grocery shopping. I planned our meals. I emptied the refrigerator of leftovers, scraping out moldy food from Tupperwares. In the kitchen, he feigned incompetence. When he unloaded the dishwasher, he’d asked where each item belonged. He had a regular nine-to-five job. He made more money, I’d reasoned. I’m better at these things. It’s easier for me. Only, it wasn’t just that. From the start, I’d wanted to please him, and I made a habit of this pleasing. We both got used to it.
“Do you like it?” I’d ask during dinner, trying to coax gratitude for the meal I’d cooked.
“Yes,” he’d reply.
“Do you think it’s good?” I’d asked, still fishing. I felt pathetic, but I wanted his approval.Good girl, Nona.
“I already said yes,” Wyatt had said. “It’s just a casserole.” He took another bite.
I dropped another little stone into my resentment jar. Plink, plink.
Yes, I would have claimed I cheated because of my overflowing resentment jar, and Wyatt’s dinner plate that, instead of clearing, he’d push forward on the table like some poker hand he was playing. I’d make a game of it, too—leave the dishes on the table to see who would clear them first. I lost every time, because after twelve hours I couldn’t take it anymore, the smear of day-old tomato sauce on plates or the crumbs that formed constellations on the table. I might have said that Wyatt didn’t respect domestic work, but the truth was he didn’t see domestic work because I’d made it invisible to him.
And whose fault was that?
That night, I’d made a casserole called Johnny Marzetti—people from Ohio love to name casseroles after men—and the cheese stuck to his plate like abstract art. A single noodle and meat crumble rested on his fork as though he’d grown full midbite and suddenly stopped.
“Your plate,” I said to him.
Wyatt’s head was inside the refrigerator, looking for something sweet. He was wearing a pair of socks with holes in them, the ones I’d put in the dust-rag bin at least a dozen times before he rescued them because he still thought they had some use.
“I got it,” he said.
“Good,” I said.
“Go,” he said, and he pulled down a bowl for ice cream, knowing I was trying to lose weight because my agent kept telling me the camera adds ten pounds, which I finally took to be the veiled suggestion that I was fat.
