time she opened the door onto its mute reproach, each time she saw the trusting faces of Wendell and Steven looking up with pleasure as she arrived, each time she saw them like this—innocent victims of her deceit—her heart smote her, and she determined in that instant to end it.
And the next day—the very next day!—hearing Eric's voice on the phone, she felt her heart quickening again in her chest, and nothing else was permitted entry into her mind. She thought of nothing else. She abandoned the rest of her life. She found herself rushing from the apartment, beds unmade, dirty dishes on the table, appointments ignored or forgotten. She lied to her husband, friends, babysitter, anyone who asked. She lied about a dentist's appointment, a seminar, a student conference, moving the car on the street. When challenged, she produced more lies. She'd been shocked and impressed at herself, she'd had no idea what she'd been capable of. She'd done things that she'd never have thought of doing. In the back of their own car one night, parked on the street, on their own block. At a party, standing up, in a bathroom, Wendell knocking at the door. She'd been insane.
She'd been helpless, willing, thrilled. The tautness and electricity of this sumptuous, illicit love, how your body yearned for it! How her skin, everywhere, had waited for Eric's touch, for his breath on the back of her neck, for the urgency of his gaze. How her blood quickened at his husky, intimate whisper in her ear. She'd been taken over by pleasure, by ecstasy; it had been her entire life for five months.
Wendell, though, had started it all.
Late one evening, after dinner, the two of them still at the kitchen table, they'd emptied a second bottle of wine. Wendell's eyelids grew heavy, his manner affectionate and confidential. He told Julia how very fond he was of her, very fond. Then he admitted, grinning, almost proud, that he'd taken the secretary from the Classics Department to a motel just across the George Washington Bridge. He'd told her all this as though she, Julia, were his accomplice. Just for the afternoon, he said, as though that made a difference. When Julia stared at him, furious, he seized her hand unsteadily.
“Don't get so mad,” he said. “It doesn't mean anything. Anyway, it was in New Jersey.”
“You think you're not married in New Jersey?” Julia asked. “How many other states are you not married in?”
“Come on,” Wendell said, shaking her hand gently. “Don't be jealous. I thought of you the whole time. When we parked the car I just sat there. I wanted to call the whole thing off.”
“But you didn't,” Julia pointed out.
“Don't be cross. You're much better in bed than she is. I'm weak, that's all.”
Julia said nothing, furious. What she thought was Why am I bothering to be faithful?
So when Eric Swenson, a sort of post-Expressionist with a long auburn ponytail, smelling of turpentine, whose studio was near hers, asked if she wanted to go for coffee, she said yes, and for five months she was swept up in that stream. Then one morning she'd waked up to nausea, and when she rolled over in bed she felt the tenderness of her breasts and knew she was pregnant, but with no idea by whom. At that moment the switch was turned off. After that, she felt exactly nothing at the sound of Eric's voice. His touch on her skin made her twitch, and she wanted to shake off his hand like an insect. It was over.
When Jackie was born—after nine months of fervent virtue, as though she could make the unborn child into Wendell's son simply by her own good behavior—she told herself he was Wendell's son. It could easily be true; she'd never know. Jackie had her blood type, A negative, and he'd grown up as Wendell's son. Julia had never told anyone.
But Jackie was the secret reminder of her scarlet season, those days spent swinging out into thin air, over the wild shadowed depths of the canyon. It was the thrill of it, the luxury of yielding to something so dangerous, so delicious, so irresistible, intoxicating. She'd been incapable of resistance, she'd had no thought of stopping. It was a madness, it was addiction. Remembering those days was like a soldier remembering the battlefield—the explosions around him matched by those in his thundering heart—in disbelief that this life and the earlier one could have been contained within the same body.
Jack was himself, of course, but he was secretly this as well, and sometimes when Julia looked at him she saw a double image—himself and his mother's secret stain. She loved him for this as well as for himself.
Long afterward, Eric asked her about Jack, at a crowded cocktail party in someone's apartment on Claremont Avenue. Eric was standing near her, too close. He held a cache of peanuts in one hand, a glass of wine in the other. His voice was low and confidential, and Julia drew away. His eyes were bloodshot, and the skin on his nose was tight and drawn.
“I wondered,” Eric said, watching her, “about your son. The younger one.” He raised his hand, opened his mouth, and tossed in a peanut. “Because of when he was born.” He chewed, his jaws grinding steadily.
“He's not yours, Eric,” Julia told him. “He's Wendell's. There's no question.”
Eric said nothing. He closed his hand over the peanuts and shook them. They made a soft rattling sound inside his fist.
“It's true. I know the night it happened,” Julia said, as though by persuading Eric she could make it so. “Women always know.”
He waited, still chewing, watching her appraisingly.
Now Julia turned over in bed, gazing up at the plaster ceiling, with its deltas of fine hairline cracks. She'd have said anything, to anyone, to make Jack into Wendell's son. Partly out of loyalty to her marriage, partly for Jack's sake. It still mattered. She'd do anything to make Jack into Wendell's son. The force of her will would make it true.
Anyway, all Jack's problems might be unrelated to his parents (whoever they were), or to their own bad behavior, or their divorce. It was tempting to think you played a part in everything your child did, since, when he was small, you did. But your child grew into his own life, chose his own path. And you couldn't blame everything on divorce—look at Steven.
She might be overreacting, in any case. Maybe drugs were no longer a problem for Jack, maybe they had never really been. It seemed everyone took them now. Steven had, she knew. Julia had herself, in college. Taking drugs was a rite of passage, an initiation into an esoteric society, somewhere darker and cooler than childhood. The illicit thrill of the secret community, the coded phrases, the rituals.
Though her own druggie phase seemed unrelated to Jack's: whatever your children did was always a little too daring, a little too fast. How were you meant to deal with them and drugs? It was hard to tease out a line to follow among the tangle of illicit behavior, tacit consent, public obloquy. Was it a question of degree? Telling your children never to take any drugs seemed naïve, so should you say that it was all right to try marijuana but not cocaine? Both were illegal. Where did you draw the line?
By the time it was a problem you had no control, anyway. Your children had left home, or were spending so much time elsewhere that they might as well have. You might draw the line anywhere you wanted, your children could simply step over it. And fighting with your children was so horrible, all that shouting and misery.
Maybe they had been too lax. How did you know? And what did you do if you had been? She thought drugs must be in Jack's life. She was hoping for them to subside, as they had in Steven's, where they must also have been.
The cracks in the ceiling had always been there. Julia thought they showed merely the way the old house shifted and settled with the sea sons, the wood frame swelling and shrinking, the plaster dampening and drying. Wendell's view had been more ominous:
