“Not that you’d ever want something like that to happen in the first place, naturally. But if it did.”
“My kids are pretty good,” she said. “Everybody’s doing okay, considering.”
Except her daughter who pretty much lived in her room all the time. Her son who had been trying to master the first five letters of the alphabet for three months, and hadn’t managed yet. Her former husband, former woodworker turned yoga devotee and physical therapy student, in love with their babysitter, though nobody was supposed to know about that. With the exception of Ursula—good, steady, dependable Ursula—every member of their family, including Toby, was basically unrecognizable from the person they’d been not even two years earlier, but Ursula wasn’t the same, either, since theChallengerexploded.
“We’re already talking about the new softball season,” he said. “We were just saying how much we’re going to miss Cam the Man on first base. I haven’t seen the guy in over a year.”
Eleanor raised the beer bottle to her lips. It had dawned on her finally that Timmy Pouliot didn’t know that she and Cam weren’t together anymore.
“That husband of yours is a lucky man,” Timmy said, biting into a cookie. For as long as she’d known him, he’d had a way of looking at her. A kind of yearning. He had it even when he was thirteen, that first time she’d met him at the waterfall when they’d talked about Van Gogh and he told her about his father’s suicide.
“Tell him hello from me, would you? We all miss him.”
Whatever Eleanor had imagined might happen when she went toTimmy Pouliot’s apartment, it wasn’t this. Sitting on the yellow plastic beanbag, breathing in the too-strong smell of her own perfume mixed with the faint scent of pizza and marijuana, she realized she had not constructed any specific pictures of what might happen once she showed up here. She had not gotten any further than the idea of putting on the mascara, delivering the cookies. But she had worn her one pair of decent underwear.
“Too bad he couldn’t come over, too,” Timmy said. “I really admire Cam. I hope someday I can be as good of a dad to my kids. If I have kids.”
His mouth was full of cookie, and it looked like it had been a couple of days since he’d shaved. He wasn’t handsome like Cam, but he had a kind face.
She put her head in her hands for a moment before looking up, looking him straight in the eye.
“I didn’t actually come here to talk about my husband,” Eleanor said.
She was jumping off the ledge now. She was falling. She didn’t even care. What did it matter anymore if she looked totally stupid and crazy? She didn’t even care if she looked to him like a terrible mother.
“I guess you hadn’t heard,” she said. “Cam and I separated last winter. The divorce will be final any day now.”
“Oh, jeez,” he said. “Holy cow. I always thought you two were, like, the perfect couple.”
Once, maybe.
“Those kids. It must be rough,” he said. “If there’s anything I can do—”
She looked at the beer poster, the pizza box. Through a beaded curtain, the bed.
“I was thinking I’d like to have an affair with you,” she told him.
It looked to Eleanor as though Timmy was having trouble processing her words to him, the same thing that was true when she spoke to Toby. For a moment his face took on a similar baffled expression.
“Oh, man,” he said. “Oh, man. I wasn’t expecting that.”
Already, she was apologizing. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said. “I was just a little crazy for a moment there.”
He reached out then and touched her hand. “You’re not crazy.”
“I’m sorry,” she told him. She was trying to get up out of the beanbag chair now, but it wasn’t easy. “You must think I’m some kind of pathetic idiot.”
He moved over toward her then so his face was even with hers, on the low chair. He touched her face.
“I’m the idiot here,” he said. “A beautiful sexy woman that I’ve been nuts about since I was in seventh grade shows up at my apartment to say she’d like to make love with me and I start talking about softball, and what a great guy her husband is. Ex-husband.”
He kissed her. That first kiss was oddly tentative, like the kiss a junior high school boy might deliver, but the next one was different.
“I never did this before,” she told him. “Not since I got married.” Not much before, either.
He was running his hands through her hair now, kissing her neck. His body, pressed against hers, felt hot, vibrating, almost.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said.
