the worst thing,” Sylvia says, “was that when I talked to Ed, he chuckled and said, ‘That’s my boy!’ and asked me if Ben was dating anyone yet.”
Ed is a good provider — he’s a dentist — but he’s also a hearty, bad-joke-telling bore. I don’t know why Sylvia married him, but I invariably fail to see the appeal of my friends’ mates.
“Lately,” Sylvia says, “Ed’s been making Steve Sutherland look more and more attractive.”
“You call Mr. Sutherland by his first name now?”
She waits until a woman with a dog walks by us before she says, sotto voce, “I’m thinking of calling and asking him out for a drink or a coffee the next time Ed goes away to one of his conferences.”
“Why am I afraid you’re not joking?”
“Because I’m not. Ed is so — Why this weekend, he — I — Okay, listen to this: he insists on reading aloud to me from the Sunday newspaper when I’m trying to have my morning coffee. Twenty years we’ve been together, he knows I hate being read to, he knows I hate being talked to at all in the morning, and still he does it.”
“That would piss me off, too.” It would.
“Whereas Steve doesn’t seem to have a single unattractive trait. And he was pretty heavily coming on to me the other night at the dance.“
“So, you’d have coffee with Mr. Sutherland and then what?”
She flushes. “A little necking in a car might be nice, some making out. Don’t you think?”
In the four years since Henry left, I have tried not to think about necking, making out, or any other form of sexual contact, and have been fairly successful at suppressing and denying any urges of that nature. But why Sylvia, who already has a live-in sex provider, wants to tangle with someone else, I don’t understand.
She says, “For years now, I’ve thought I was happy enough with Ed, that his good points outweighed his bad, and I never thought about cheating. But now it’s like I’ve become enveloped in a cloud of fairy lust. All I can think about is how sexy Steve is, and what I’d like to do to him, in graphic detail.”
“Graphic detail that you’ll spare me, I hope.”
“You’re such a prude sometimes, Emily, honestly. But do you know what I mean? Has this ever happened to you?”
What did she call it? Fairy lust? How immature. “No, I can’t say that it has.” Not that I would admit, anyway.
I’m standing inside my door at 8:38 a.m., dressed and ready to go. I try not to tap my foot while I wait for Jesse to finish wandering around the house the way he does every morning, picking up his various items for school. If he were me, he would pack up the night before, but he’s not me.
“Have you got your phone and your wallet?” I ask this every morning. It’s part of our scripted routine. “And your lunch and your bus tickets?”
He says yeah and yeah, then, “Wait. Is it Thursday?”
“Yes, and can you please get going? I’m in a hurry.”
“It is Thursday? Fuck. Basketball tryouts are today after school.” He runs upstairs. “Do you know where my Jordans are? And my sports bag?”
I set down my briefcase, walk to the mudroom at the back of the house, and retrieve his basketball shoes and sports bag from the built-in cupboard designated for this purpose, the cupboard Jesse can never bring himself to use. I meet him in the front hall, where he throws a T-shirt, shorts, and his ankle brace into the bag, shrugs on his jacket, and says, “What? I’m ready. Are you?”
“Let’s just go.”
In the car, he says, “Where are you rushing off to this morning, anyway, that you’re so freaked out about the time? Going for a walk with Sylvia?”
I’m dressed in my business-type clothes and I have my briefcase. “Do I look like I’m going walking to you?”
“Forget it.” He turns on the car radio and switches the channel to his station.
“I’m teaching today,” I say, above the music. “In Leo Antonelli’s class. Remember, I did it last week?”
“Then where are your slides?”
“I packed them in the trunk earlier, when you were still asleep. After I read the newspaper and had my coffee and before I took my shower and made your lunch and breakfast.”
“Are you done talking now? Because I’d like to listen to this song.”
I want to ask him about the basketball tryouts — if this is the first or has he missed one, and when is the next, and what time should I expect him home, and is it the same coach as last year. I need to know if I should worry about this aspect of his life. But the moment isn’t right. And I can always interrogate him tonight, when he comes home for dinner, turns on the television to watch while he eats, and will be even less inclined to talk.
I pull up in front of the school at three minutes to the bell. Jesse opens the car door, shrugs on his knapsack, turns around, and looks in the back seat. “Oh shit,” he says, more sheepish than angry.
“What?”
“You’re not going to like this.”
“What?”
“I left my sports bag at home.”
“For fuck’s sake, Jesse.”
“Can you bring it at lunch? Please? I get out at 11:45.”
If I hustle, I can make it home and back to school after my lecture by noon. I don’t want to, but I can.
He says, “Can you?”
“I could meet you at 12:05, not earlier.”
He hops out of the car. “Thanks, Em, you’re a doll. I’ll meet you at 12:05, right here.”
Leo Antonelli made his name young, designing homes in the Post-Modernist idiom — he’s known for a handful of steel-framed, glass-walled, flat-roofed residences built in locations that afford panoramic views. In the mid-seventies, he took up a teaching position at the university’s faculty of architecture, where he still lectures, wears striped bowties and suits of English tailoring, and sports the startling, out-to-there eyebrows some men of his generation affect.
When I was a student, he took a kindly interest in me. He admired my spunk (his word) and called me a spitfire, which I’ve always considered a euphemism for a woman who’s energetic in an off-putting, mannish way, but he meant it as praise. After I graduated, he encouraged me to keep in touch and he followed my career progress. When I left the big firm, started Harada Restorations, and was struggling to make a go of it, he invited me, one term, to give a few guest lectures, for pay, to his students, about nineteenth-century Canadian architecture and the challenges of restoring it. When the lectures went well, he charitably suggested I repeat the series of three one-hour talks each term thereafter.
I’m
