Reunion: A Novel Read online

  “I said I was sorry.” There’s a couple behind us who look annoyed that we’re in line at all. We’re not being as aggressive with moving ahead as they’d like us to be.

  “By ‘sorry,’” he says, “what do you mean exactly? I want you to be very clear.”

  “I mean, I’m sorry that it happened.”

  The person in front of us moves ahead and Peter rolls my bag forward.

  “Do you mean that you wish it hadn’t happened?” he says.

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “So you’d do it again?”

  “No. I would not in the future do it again.”

  “But if you could go back, you wouldn’t undo what you’ve done?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “So you’re not sorry.”

  “I am.”

  “Then why won’t you tell me what I want to hear?” He pauses, and I know what he’s going to say next, because it’s what he always says when he wants to hurt me. “Pretend we’re in a movie,” he says. “All you have to do is say the line.”

  I shake my head. “I’m trying to be honest.”

  “Honest?” He nudges a shoe into my bag so that it inches away from us. “What do you know about honest?”

  “I’m working on it,” I say.

  “Now she wants to work on it,” he says, looking around, addressing an invisible audience. An odious habit. “Now she wants to be honest. Not last week, not last year, but now. After the fact.” He pauses. “Lucky me.”

  He’s right, of course. I don’t know what I want. But it feels impossible to admit this to him. He’s backed me into a corner and given me no graceful exit. The couple behind us—the man—coughs. I glance back and make the briefest eye contact with the woman. It’s just long enough to see that she feels sorry for me and suddenly—poof! out of nowhere!—I’m crippled with shame to be standing in line with my husband, waiting like a child to be manhandled onto a plane.

  “Please,” I whisper to Peter and try to take the handle of my luggage. “Just leave.”

  “You won’t get on a plane if I leave,” he says, pushing my hand away. I don’t dare look at the woman. “You’re broke, remember?”

  Technically, I am not broke. Technically, I am simply in debt.

  The man behind us coughs again. It makes me want to gag. Does he think I don’t know this is pathetic? Does he think his coughing is teaching us—me—a lesson? Let the man cough all he wants.

  “Pretend it didn’t happen,” I say. “Put yourself in my shoes.”

  He smiles. “Hold on.” Now he nods his head. “Let me give that a try.” He nods his head some more. “Your shoes, you say?”

  I mimic his nod. At last, I think. Now we are getting somewhere. This is progress. Progress at last. Why did it never occur to me before to ask him, simply, to consider my side of things?

  “Something like this?” he says. His smile is gone. “My wife who loves me and trusts me and supports me—” He pauses. “This wife comes home one day and says, ‘Baby love, all I’m asking is that you just think about this one thing, that you just consider it. I know we didn’t want it when we first got together. But we’re both reasonable people. We’re both adults. And so I know it’s within your adult brain’s power to just consider the idea of adoption. To just consider it.’”

  “Stop,” I say.

  But he doesn’t.

  “And I, the husband, I say—for some fucked-up, unknowable reason—I say, ‘Yes, baby love, let’s absolutely look into that. That sounds like a beautiful idea. Why don’t you go do a year’s worth of footwork and waste your precious time, while I go out and find a maid to screw?’” He pauses. “Something like that?”

  “We don’t have a maid.”

  “Unbelievable,” he says.

  “You’re not trying hard enough,” I say. “You didn’t even try.”

  “Know who you remind me of?” says Peter. We are next in line. We are almost to the front. All I want now is to get this over with. All I want is for Peter to buy my ticket and then disappear. Fuck it. Send me to Atlanta.

  “No,” I say.

  “Your father,” says Peter.

  It’s such a cliché, but my mouth has actually dropped open. I’m tempted to laugh. In all the endlessly exhausting conversations we’ve had about the affair over the past thirty days, not once has Peter thought to associate me with my father. But today, on the day of his death, he gets the brilliant idea to make the comparison.

  “You’re going to feel shitty about saying that,” I say.

  “I won’t,” he says.

  Wrong. Absolutely wrong. He’s stooped to my level, and he’s already regretting it. I can see it all over his face. Poor Peter: He forgets. He is my husband. I still know him. He can hate me all he wants, but he can’t suddenly unknow me. Them’s the rules, baby love.

  He wheels my bag to the counter and takes out his wallet.

  “Atlanta,” he says. “One way.”

  The woman at the kiosk takes his card. I hand her my ID. She doesn’t make eye contact with me while she’s doing the paperwork. I never wanted to be one of these women. I never wanted to be looked at—or not looked at—by other women with pity.

  I am handed my ticket and Peter is handed back his credit card. We walk a few paces away from the kiosk. He turns to me, and I turn to him.

  “Do you have any cash on you?” he says. “Any at all?”

  “I’m fine,” I say. “I’ll be fine. They have ATMs at airports.”

  “How much is in your account?”

  I’m looking past Peter, at a trash can outside the women’s restrooms. There’s a little kid in sweatpants and a sweatshirt. He looks poor. Not dirty—I’m not Nell. Just poor. I wonder what he’s doing at the airport. How can poor people afford to fly? I can’t even afford to fly. Without Peter, there’s no way I’d be able to make this trip, not without asking Nell or Elliot for a loan, which you couldn’t pay me to do.

  “I have enough,” I say at last. I give a little shrug.

  Peter reaches toward his back pocket and my neck goes instantly hot. I cross my arms and shove my hands into my armpits. I wish we were invisible. I wish we were in a bubble and no one could see us, because, really, the people who are seeing us, what do they think they see? Do they see two awkward strangers? Do they see a shady deal in progress? Or do they see a husband and wife? And if they do see a husband and wife, what do they make of the husband taking out his wallet, of the wife staring shamefaced at the floor?

  “Kate,” he says.

  His wallet is poised between us, in the mere inches of ether between his hand and my heart. My breathing is erratic and it occurs to me that if I fainted, if I simply let my body go limp and fall to the ground, he’d have to put away his wallet and tend to me. He’d have to. Facts are facts.

  “When you get back,” he says, taking out three twenties from the middle sleeve, “we’re going to have to figure this out.” There are more twenties in there, but he takes out only three.

  I don’t say anything.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” he says. “Don’t you?”

  In fact, I do know what he’s talking about. He’s talking about our financial situation. In part, he’s talking about my school debt (close to thirty thousand dollars still). But mostly he’s talking about the forty-eight thousand dollars’ worth of credit card debt I’ve been paying off since we married and how he’s been covering everything—everything—while I cover the monthly installment plan he helped me set up. He’s talking about the fact that while it’s true that I am employed, it’s also true that it’s not enough, not nearly enough, to take care of myself and continue to make my final year’s worth of payments.

  “Give me a nod,” he says. “Let me know you understand.”

  “This sucks,” I say.

  He takes my fist from where it’s been tucked into my armpit. We both look down at it, and I think, How did we get here? How did we get to this exact minute in
time?

  He unfurls my fingers one by one, puts the twenties in my palm, then takes his hand away. So many times, on so many occasions, Peter has opened his wallet and handed me a few twenty-dollar bills. Never—not once—has it felt as dirty and loathsome as this. But the fact of the matter is, he’s right: my bank account has less than fifty dollars in it and my next paycheck won’t deposit until after the weekend, and if he actually decides to cut me off, I’ll be without income until the fall semester begins.

  I tuck the money into the front pocket of my jeans.

  “Peter,” I say.

  I could tell him what he wants to hear. I could say it now. All I’d have to do is deliver the lines.

  “Peter,” I say again. Where is my prompt? Where is my whiteboard covered in big block letters?

  “Have a nice flight,” he says.

  And because I can think of nothing less common, I say, “Have a nice life.”

  And then he’s gone.

  5

  flight to Atlanta

  I take my seat in business with a sort of flourish—economy was completely sold out—and order a gin and tonic before we even take off, my second since Peter left the airport. I have forty-five dollars of his pity left. If it’s possible, I’ll spend every penny of it on booze before I’ve even reached the baggage claim in Atlanta. My cheeks are flushed and my face is feeling genuinely smiley. I love flying. There’s at least that. Every semester, my school foots the bill for me to attend the latest conference on the latest screenwriting techniques, which I am then to bring back to all of my screenwriting students. I’m positively devoted to the flights and the hotels. It’s like being a different person. You get to board a plane by yourself and check into a hotel by yourself and you could be anybody. You could be a woman with a husband, for instance, or you could be a woman without one. Take your pick.

  I check my phone. Two new messages. They’re both from Nell. I push play and cradle the phone to my ear, careful this time not to engage the speaker function. I lean against the window and close my eyes.

  “Kiddo,” says Nell’s recording. “I’m in Colorado. Elliot’s here. Rita brought the girls. I had time to go through security and meet them at the drop-off. Joe’s gorgeous. It’s gross.” Elliot says something in the background. Nell muffles something back to him. There’s a pause, maybe a sniffle. “We can’t wait to see you.” Then she’s gone. The next message is just static.

  By my calculation, the plane I’m on will land about an hour before Nell and Elliot’s—just enough time to negotiate the airport, order a few drinks, and be waiting at their gate as a sort of surprise. I can spend forty-five dollars in an hour. I can spend it in a heartbeat. Just watch me.

  On a different night, under different circumstances, I’d be thinking about Nell and Elliot. I’d be jealous that they’re on a flight together, catching up without me—me, eternally the little sister. But tonight. Tonight I am thinking, reluctantly, of my father. “Toughen up,” he used to say when he’d catch me crying in a corner. “What’s the matter with you?” Sometimes he’d hold up his hands, turn his palms outward, and say, “Hit me. Come on. Hit me. You’ll feel better.” This started when I was five, just after our mother died. It continued until I left for college. Thirteen years of seeing those palms, of being asked to hit them, of being told feeling better was as simple as following through. But if I did hit him, it was never hard enough, which meant I wasn’t committed. And if I didn’t hit him, it was because my personality was milquetoast. That was his word. Milquetoast. And now Peter’s gone and said I’m just like him. Daddy issues? Absolutely not.

  The one time I was brazen enough to suggest to Nell and Elliot that their commitment to our father was predicated on his having purchased their college educations, they shot me down. Elliot had just turned thirty. He was already pulling in close to two hundred thousand dollars a year. Nell was only a production manager then, but she was in the high five figures and poised to move into the realm of the sixes any minute.

  What Elliot said was, “Horseshit. That’s total horseshit. If he’d offered you tuition, you’d have taken it. You’re pretending we should put you on some sort of pedestal because you turned his money down.”

  “But he didn’t even offer you money,” said Nell. “It’s our fault? We should have said no? We should have guessed that he wasn’t going to give you any?”

  I told them they were missing my point. I tried to explain to them that I could care less about the money—a lie, since tuition was only a taste of the massive debt I was already in the process of acquiring—it was the fact that the money had blinded them to certain realities about his character. “There were no good years—never,” I said. “That’s a lie you tell yourselves to make it okay that you took money from the Nazis.”

  “Is she comparing Dad to Hitler?” said Elliot. “I think she’s comparing our father to the Fuehrer.”

  “She’d have taken his money,” said Nell. “She’d have taken it in the blink of an eye if he’d offered it to her.”

  I was standing right in front of them. We were in the same room. We were also drunk. All three of us.

  “Are we supposed to feel sorry for you?” said Elliot. “Is that what you want?”

  “I think she wants her share,” said Nell. “I think she wants us to pay her back or something.”

  “I don’t feel sorry for her,” said Elliot. “Not even a little.”

  The reason they didn’t feel sorry for me was that the year before—my first year out of college—I’d sold a screenplay. I’d gotten twenty thousand dollars up front. I quit my job as a waitress and moved to Berkeley. The money was gone in four months. I hadn’t paid a cent toward taxes. But everything was okay. Or it seemed like it was okay, because I had applied for and been granted this amazing little thing called a credit card. Of course, Elliot and Nell knew nothing about this. They only knew that I’d sold a screenplay and appeared, on the surface at least, to be their successful artist sister.

  Of course, the film never got made. But that’s not the point. The point is that the one time I tried to illustrate to Nell and Elliot that their perception of our father might be slightly skewed because of his financial contributions to their educational development, they shot me down so quickly and so cruelly that I never again broached the subject. At least not with them. With Peter, yes.

  By the time I met Peter, my debt—not even counting school loans—was in the low thirties. By the time we married, it was in the low forties. Wait, you say. Hold on there just one minute. Tell us about these amazing things you were purchasing with all this credit. Tell us, please, that those cash advances were to help the hungry family of four who lived below you or to support yourself while you toiled away endless hours at the shelter, or if not the shelter, then surely some do-gooder nonprofit, and if not a nonprofit, then while you advanced your burgeoning artistic career with dozens of new screenplays. But the answer is no. None of that. The answer is that I spent it on clothes. Clothes and shoes and booze and food. Debt? It’s as easy as infidelity. It’s easier.

  At first it’s just a thousand dollars. And you lie awake thinking, How did I let it get to be so much? That was so stupid. Just pay it off and be done. But instead of paying it off, you only pay it down. And just when it feels almost manageable, they send an offer: Take a month off from payments, they say. Just one month! We’ll increase your APR, but you’ll have thirty days—thirty whole days!—during which you won’t once lie awake thinking about how to repay it all. So you say, Yes. You say, Bring it on. And then one thousand turns to two and then two turns to four and then four turns to twelve, and then you realize there’s no way out. There’s no way out, that is, until this lovely human being asks you to marry him and it dawns on you that in order to say yes, you’re going to have to come clean. And so you do. Mostly.

  THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT brings my gin and tonic. The man next to me orders tomato juice. I consider making small talk—perhaps offer to buy a mini bottle of vo
dka to go with his juice—but then I remember Frank from Wisconsin and decide against it.

  Instead I dial Rita. She answers on the first ring. Goddamn I love this woman sometimes. I mean, I always love her. But sometimes I just want to swallow her whole and carry her around in my belly.

  “Hi, you,” she says.

  “Hi,” I say. Every once in a while, I think about telling Rita the truth. I think maybe she’s the only one out of everyone who might possibly understand. In the movie version of our lives, she’s played by a young Diane Keaton or maybe a young Katharine Hepburn. It’s the mother in her, maybe, but I truly believe that I could tell her about the affair, about Peter’s talk of divorce, about the debt and how it’s almost over, about all the million secrets I tell myself every single night as I’m falling asleep, and she wouldn’t judge me. She’d just smile and nod, refill my glass of juice. Maybe.

  “How’s your brain?” she says.

  “Wishing it were on drugs.”

  I squeeze the dried-up lime wedge into my glass and then drop it in so that it’s floating there on top of the ice cubes.

  “Where are you?”

  “On a plane,” I say. “About to leave Chicago.”

  “Is Peter going with you?”

  I shake my head and take a sip of my drink, but then remember Rita can’t see me.

  “No,” I say. “He can’t miss work.” There are a few people I don’t like lying to, and Rita’s one of them.

  “That’s good,” she says. Rita can spin just about anything but her own life into something positive. “More time for you and Nell and Elliot. You guys need this. This will be good for you.”

  When I told Rita about calling off the adoption—this was almost a year ago exactly—she didn’t even blink. All she said was “Listen to your heart,” an expression whose cheesiness and overuse normally make me grimace, but which, given the circumstances, sounded like the wisest advice I’d ever heard.

  “How are the girls?” I say, happy for the moment not to be constructing a compare/contrast chart of me and my father in my head.