by default, I guess you could say. He was still annoying, though. Still a baby. My first wife? Patti? She was always trying to fix him up with women from her bank, but nothing ever took. I mean, even now, the guy’s in his mid-forties—runs a business, for Christ’s sake—and you know what he’s into? Paintball. You know what’s sitting on top of the file cabinet in his office? His friggin’ Super-Soaker.
But anyway, nighttime baking suited me okay; I wasn’t sleeping for shit anyway. I kept telling myself that my year away from teaching gave me the perfect opportunity to write again—kept feeding myself that “Life gives you lemons, make lemonade” crap. I bought a three-ring binder and a three-hundred-sheet package of loose-leaf paper. Put the paper in the binder, snapped the rings shut, put a pen in the pocket, and put it on the nightstand next to my bed. But I didn’t write again. Didn’t open that fucking loose-leaf binder once.
And then Maureen called me. Out of the blue, on Halloween night. Well, it was one in the morning, so, technically, it was already November the first. All Saints Day, I remembered, from my Catholic childhood. Mo was crying. She was scared, she said. Sophie, the older and needier of our two mutts, was sick. Dying, maybe. Dogs could die from too much chocolate, right? Maureen had overplanned for trick-or-treaters, then gone to bed, leaving most of the unclaimed candy in a bowl by the door. Sophie had chowed down on thirty or forty of those miniature Hershey bars, wrappers and all. She’d been vomiting chocolate, paper, and foil nonstop for two hours. The vet’s answering service wouldn’t pick up. Could I come over?
I stopped at the all-night convenience store on my way and bought Pepto-Bismol. Sent Maureen to bed and stayed up with Soph for the rest of the night. She stopped retching around three in the morning. I sat there, watching her sleep, her chest heaving. By dawn, her breathing had normalized. By seven, she was up again, looking better and wanting breakfast.
One thing led to another with Mo and me. She’d tell me okay, I could come over for a cup of coffee. “One hour,” she’d insist. The first time, she even set the stove timer. Then she let me take her out to dinner. Then we started walking the dogs out by the reservoir. Started watching UConn basketball on TV. One night when I went over there, I brought a bottle of wine, and we drank it and made out on the couch. Made our way to the bedroom. We were awkward with each other, out of synch. I came before she was anywhere near ready. “It’s okay,” she kept saying. “It’s fine.”
Later, after I’d started dozing, she said, “Caelum?”
“Hmm?”
“Tell me a secret.”
At first I didn’t say anything. Then I said, “What kind of secret?”
“Something you’ve never told anyone before.”
Mr. Zadzilko, I thought. I saw his broad face before me, the bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling of the utility closet. “I don’t…I can’t think of anything.”
“Tell me something about your ex-wife.”
“Patti?”
“Francesca. You never talk about her.”
I rolled toward her, onto my side. And because I wanted to come home again, I complied. “Well,” I said. “When I started writing my book? She bought me a computer. My first computer.”
Mo said that wasn’t a secret. It didn’t count.
“Yeah, but wait. The day she left me? She took her house key—the one she left behind—and scratched something onto the face of the monitor.”
“What?”
“Two words: emotional castrato…. Like our whole marriage was my fault. Like her living in New York all week and coming home on weekends—some weekends, I should say, fewer and fewer, actually—like that had nothing to do with it. And here’s what a freaking masochist I was: I lived with that goddamned monitor. Kept typing away, squinting around and past those words. It was four or five months before I unplugged the fucker and hefted it out to the curb. Lifted it over my head and dropped it face-first onto the sidewalk, just so I could hear the pleasure of it crash. Spring cleanup, it was, and the town trucks were driving around, picking up people’s bulky waste. And the next morning, I heard the truck and stood at the window. Had the pleasure of watching them haul it away…. So there’s your secret.”
“Who else knows about it?” she asked.
“No one else. Just you.”
She reached over. Stroked my hair, my cheek. “After my parents split up?” she said. “When I used to spend weekends with my father? He’d come into my room some nights, sit in the chair across from my bed and…”
“What?”
“Masturbate.” My mind ricocheted. She anticipated the question I wanted and didn’t want to ask. “That was as far as it ever went. He never…you know.”
“Did he think you were asleep?”
“No. He used to watch me watching him. Neither of us ever said anything. He’d just do it, finish up, and leave. And in the morning, he’d be Daddy again. Take me out and buy me chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast.”
“That’s sick,” I said. “How many times did it happen?”
“Two or three, maybe. Then he started seeing the Barracuda, and it stopped.” The Barracuda was Evelyn, her stepmother, a high-stakes real estate broker. From the start, Evelyn and Mo had kept their distance.
“You tell your mother?”
“No. You’re the first person I’ve ever told…. It was pretty confusing. I was only eleven. I mean, most of the time he was so distant. So unavailable. Then he’d…I knew it was wrong to watch him. Dirty or whatever, but…”
“But what?”
“It was this thing we shared. This secret. It messed me up, though. I slept around a lot in high school.”
I put my arm around her. Squeezed her tight, then tighter.
“Caelum? Do you think you could trust me again? I know I’ve given you good reason not to, but…I mean, if you’re going to be all Sherlock Holmes every time I go out…”
I told her I wanted to be able to trust her—that working on it was the best I could promise.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s fair.”
On our next date, she told me I could come back home if I wanted to. There was one condition, though: couples counseling.
Our therapist, the sari-wearing, no-nonsense Dr. Beena Patel, was a dead ringer for Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I’d assumed Mo was going to be the one to take the heat, since she was the one who’d cheated, but within the first fifteen minutes of session one, I realized that Dr. Patel was going to be an equal-opportunity nutcracker. Besides, Dr. Patel said, she thought it would be more profitable for us to focus on the future than the past. And speaking of profitable, her fee was a hundred and fifteen a pop.
Dr. Patel assigned homework. She made Mo and me design a series of nonverbal requests we could use when asking directly for something made either one of us feel too vulnerable. Universally recognizable signals weren’t permitted. No raised middle finger
