CHAPTER ELEVEN #4
The world dropped out from under Carver, and his vision dimmed for a second.
He gripped the railing and inhaled, then shot a look at Scott, who appeared stricken.
The look was meant to say let me handle this, I’m the better liar, but when he looked back at Lillian’s impassive face, he found himself saying, “Yes.”
“Carver,” Scott exclaimed, dropping his cigarette.
Lillian nodded, her gaze steady. She was scrutinizing him like a disappointed manager.
“Okay,” she said. To Scott, in an explanatory tone, she said, “He thinks I don’t know what he gets up to on the side, but I do. I’m aware he has certain needs.”
Carver exhaled, his heart pounding wildly. The scene before him swam in his vision, and he took a step back from them, still gripping the railing. “What needs?”
“He thinks you don’t know?” Scott said, staring Carver down. “I thought you had an arrangement?”
“I knew she knew, it was unspoken,” Carver said, trying to catch his breath. “What needs?”
“The needs of a man who’s predominantly homosexual and pretty sexually submissive,” Lillian said, lazily wiggling her cigarette at him.
His heart stopped, then stuttered back on.
“Look, I’m not an old-fashioned person. I’m happy for both of us to do what we like, and I always thought you were too riddled with anxiety to risk contaminating me with germs or suboptimal situations.
But there’s something going on here that I don’t like. ”
“I don’t think I should be part of this conversation,” Scott said, moving to leave. Lillian stepped in his way and put a hand on his arm.
“Stay,” she said, smiling. “You fuck my husband and you won’t even talk things out with me? Come on. That’s rude.”
“I don’t —” Scott was not making eye contact with either of them. He kept looking over both of their heads. “There’s no, um — we made a mistake. We got caught up in nostalgia.”
“No, I don’t think that’s all of it,” Lillian said. She took a drag, then blew a stream of smoke directly into Scott’s eyes. He stood there blinking frantically. “And that’s my point. I don’t like how you’ve been looking at each other. It’s a little much.”
Scott blinked more, but remained otherwise frozen. He had never dealt with Lillian before, of course.
“Honey,” Carver said, and Lillian turned to him with a look of irritated amusement. “Maybe you’re more okay with me fucking around on you in theory than you are when you’re actually, like, looking at the person.”
“Please,” Lillian said. “You’re not going to turn this around on me. No one here is unaware of what’s going on.”
“What’s going on?”
Behind them, the door opened. They all turned and saw a young woman, drunk-looking, with a vape in her hand.
“Actually, can we get some privacy?” Scott called to her, sounding rattled.
The young woman laughed like he was being ridiculous, then looked between them, seemed to realize she was genuinely intruding on something, and slunk back inside.
“What’s going on?” Carver repeated, staring his wife down.
“You have a crush on him,” Lillian said, pointing at Scott. A breeze whipped her hair. “You have feelings about this person, and you’ve been acting very irrationally.”
Carver felt pain between his fingers and looked to see that his cigarette had burned down to the filter and was scorching him. He dropped it. “Prove I have feelings,” he said.
“Oh, my God,” Lillian said with an eyeroll. “Can we please just accept the obvious facts and go from there? It’s like talking to some children.”
“What are you trying to accomplish here? What’s the endgame?”
She smoked some more. “That’s my question. This shit you dug up here, is it going to stay behind when we leave tomorrow? Or is this going to be a problem?”
Carver got a shiver up his spine and rolled his shoulders to banish it. “Why wouldn’t it stay behind?”
“You’ve never snaked me on a deal before. Six months ago it wouldn’t have even occurred to you. But I think you’re having an early mid-life crisis.”
“We had never been in that specific situation before, Lillian.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “You’ve never looked at me like you did a few minutes ago.”
“How?”
Lillian looked into and through him. “Like you had another offer on the table.”
Carver scoffed and looked out over the dark golf course. Nausea had begun roiling his stomach. He wanted desperately to find a way out of this, to say the thing that made it stop, but he only seemed able to dig himself deeper.
“To be clear, you don’t get to have another offer on the table,” she said. “Okay?”
“He doesn’t belong to you,” Scott said, sounding like a noble but oafish teenager. “A marriage isn’t handcuffs.”
“So who does he belong to?” Lillian said. “You? You were each other’s first fuck, or first love, whatever, so it’s rule of capture — first in time, first in right? Am I close?”
“That’s not how I’m thinking about it at all. I’ve never had a fucked-up thought like that in my life.”
“I’m not talking about your thoughts,” Lillian said, like he was being obtuse, and she tapped him in the crotch.
Scott stiffened and moved to bat her hand away, but it was already away.
Carver turned to look through the glass at the people inside the reception hall, who were still milling around and having a carefree good time.
The Electric Slide was playing, and two dozen people were on the dance floor performing the moves. It’s electric, boogie woogie woogie.
“He doesn’t belong to anyone but himself,” Scott said.
“Yeah, sure, in theory,” Lillian said. “But you understand he wants to belong to someone. You do get that about him, right?”
At the moment Carver in fact did not want to belong to anyone. He wanted to sink through the balcony, through the patio, down into the earth until he reached its molten core.
Scott looked between them and laughed in a disgusted way, the way someone would laugh at a hokey slasher movie. “Okay. So that really is the deal between you two? She’s a sadist, you’re a masochist?”
Lillian wrinkled her nose. “You think I beat him with a whip?”
“I was talking emotionally.”
“Okay, so nothing real. And you’re, what, Captain Save-a-Hoe, manbun Heathcliff?”
Scott spread his arms at this, looking astounded. “Who’s the hoe here, your husband?”
Lillian looked Carver up and down, raised a hand and blew air out of her mouth comically. “He’s got his tendencies.”
“You’re insane,” Scott said. “Carver, you get that, right? This woman is insane.”
“I’m not insane, I’m correct. God, you people are fucking boring. You’ve been boring the shit out of me all weekend.”
“Then hit the road!” Scott shouted.
Lillian put a hand up. “Shut uppp, don’t make a scene.
Look, you’re right that he could run away with you tonight if he wanted, but I know my husband and I don’t think he has that in him.
The most likely outcome is for him to stick with the status quo, and cut you off once we’re back in the city.
I just want to be clear about something — that would need to be a clean cut.
No texting, no mooning and crying, no second thoughts. ”
This last part was directed at Carver, who felt like he had a concussion. He stared at Lillian’s statuesque face and watched her lips move. A moment after they stopped moving, she grabbed him by the face and forced eye contact onto him.
“You’re not going to embarrass me,” she said, her voice low and almost gentle.
Carver yanked out of her grip and walked backward toward the doors.
She and Scott stared at him, watching him go.
Their lips continued to move. Unfortunately for them, he had dolly zoomed out of his body and could only watch as he parted the reception hall crowd, ran down the staircase, through the downstairs lounge and out of the club.
He ran across the patio into the grass and kept running, down past the driving range and onto the golf course.
It was peaceful out here. He could only dimly see where he was going thanks to the illumination of a few scattered floodlights. The air smelled sharp and fresh, like fresh-cut grass and the chemicals the club used to tame it. Carver went far, fast, sprinting all-out.
He began to come back into his head around the same time he felt his lungs start to burn, and he slowed a little. Someone was shouting behind him. Someone was shouting his name, actually. He slowed to a jog, then a walk, and then he turned around.