Chapter Fifteen #3
“I’m okay,” Joan said. She felt a brief, gutting stab of disappointment when he released her hand.
Their interaction, while oddly intimate given their relationship, was fleeting in her thoughts that evening, though she would think about it many times in the years to come.
That’s how it is with such moments: we don’t always know which will stick around, and sometimes they are so vivid we must pack them away for a while.
Joan would think about this later—how few truly surprising, lovely moments one receives in a lifetime.
Surely there must be ways to have a new connection, a satisfying connection, without resorting to what Bill did.
Joan would devote a great deal of herself to this question; it would become one of her life’s obsessions.
But. That was to come. For now, Joan watched Trevor return to his house. He walked stiffly, as if he knew she was watching. She glanced away, to afford him privacy, though she believed he would not look back. It was dark and the moon full, a fat white button in the sky.
In the car, Joan’s thoughts returned to Bill. She pulled forward and began down the road to home.
There would be others over the years. A radiologist, a baker, a substitute teacher.
Each time Joan discovered a new betrayal she went to Bill and asked why.
To the best of her understanding, it was because such women were there: he fell in lust, and while he knew it would be brief he still thought it’d be fun to have the experience.
He would try to be better, he said. He always promised he would try.
Many times Joan considered leaving him. She was disgusted by him, she wished him gone.
In her worst moments she wondered what it’d be like if he were dead.
How free she would be! She compared herself to Bill’s other women and did not know what separated them, why he should be married to her when others had been discarded.
Was it because she had gone to Stanford?
That she had been hesitant to sleep with him?
It was the slim margins through which life’s significant victories were won that kept her awake at night.
“What if we divorced?” she asked him once.
Bill was startled by the question, though not as much as Joan hoped. “I would be devastated, of course. You’re an incredible woman.”
“Why did you divorce before?”
“If I’m being honest, I suppose I’ve never been too good at compromising.”
Well, I don’t like compromising either, Joan thought. I’ve compromised enough.
Could she be divorced again? Joan had yet to meet another Asian woman who’d been divorced, although Joan supposed they must exist, they just didn’t speak of it (she never offered up the fact about herself either).
But to be divorced twice seemed to indicate some greater personal deficiency. Would she have to move? Find a job?
She should have a job, Joan thought. She should have a career, something she knew how to do.
Joan had never considered that she might not work; her life until Bill had been defined by money, or specifically the lack of it, the immigrant’s perpetual quest for survival.
She’d been so awed by the abundance of Bill’s life, the ease and pleasure of it, that she had simply fallen into this place—and now she was in this other unfortunate space, the one where her husband lapsed and lapsed and somehow still she stayed.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Joan asked Lee and Jamie one afternoon.
“I don’t know,” the children answered simultaneously.
They were busy with their latest game, which involved a low hexagonal building they had built out of a vast pile of plastic bricks in the corner of the playroom.
The two had been building for some time; the structure was nearly up to Lee’s waist. There was no discernible color scheme, and the children appeared to have used whatever pieces were immediately at hand.
On the building’s side was a paper sheet, and Joan crouched to read.
PLANET INFINITY
RULE #1: ONE TICKET TO ENTER
RULE #2: AGE 6 AND OLDER ONLY
“What is Planet Infinity?” Joan asked.
“A place,” Lee said. She jammed a fireman into a carousel and shoved it into a corner. “A nice one. With lots of rooms.”
“What do you do there?”
“Fly to Jupiter. Eat chocolate bars. Or anything else you want. It can create it. Infinitely.”
“It’s kind of like a portal,” Jamie said.
He removed the sign, careful not to rip the clear tape.
On the bottom, he wrote: RULE #3: NO TOUCHING OTHERS’ ITEMS WITHOUT PERMISSION and then taped back up the sign.
Jamie had a collection of model cars and was upset when Lee took one, as she was a rough player.
“So is it really a planet?” Joan asked. “Or maybe more a theme park of some kind?”
Lee and Jamie exchanged a look; Joan was pleased by their unity, even though she was aware that any tacit communication was likely a shared annoyance toward her.
“It’s our space,” Lee said with finality.
Yes, it was true that it was their space, Joan thought. They were free to play and pretend as they wished.
That evening Joan straightened the house as usual but was careful to leave Planet Infinity intact.
The children had built it up farther; there were multiple levels, and a rocket pad had been added to the roof.
They explained they were capturing all their good ideas now so they wouldn’t forget them later.
“Like when we’re older and have other things to think about,” Jamie said.
“Right,” Joan agreed. She read them their bedtime stories in Lee’s room. Afterward she went to sit in the backyard, under the veranda.
“Good night, Papa,” she heard Lee and Jamie call. Their windows were open.
“Good night,” Bill said, and then Joan could hear him launch into one of his occasional evening routines, a pantomime called ATTACK in which he played from a rotating list of villains and pounced.
Joan had asked him not to work up the children before bed, but he always forgot; he was the playful parent, the imaginative one, and as he roared from room to room, she could hear Jamie and Lee laugh and shriek in an uncontrolled manner they never did with her.
Joan bent and scratched her leg. The wicker couches were dented near her calf, injuries from Jamie launching trucks against the furniture in earlier years.
The rattan screens bore similar scars. When they visited Bridget’s home in Ross, Joan always admired the decor.
How everything seemed to be of such nice quality but not brand-new.
“Oh, this old thing?” Bridget would say.
“I can’t remember where I got it, I’ve had it for years.
” (Bill said Bridget was lying, that she knew the provenance of everything she owned, but that wasn’t the point.) The point was that Joan had been with Bill for many years now, long enough for her furniture to develop a patina as well.
Joan removed from her pocket the scrap she had found in Bill’s coat that morning.
The piece of paper, unevenly ripped and the size of Joan’s palm, looked to be from a junk brochure.
On an empty corner, Bill had written: Kathleen (receptionist—dentist) , followed by a number.
It was one of his quirks that he seemed to recall women by their jobs; to Joan’s knowledge, he cheated only with women who had jobs.
She theorized it was because that was where Bill met them—at their work.
Joan recognized the area code as from the next town over.
It’s not that Bill isn’t bad, Joan thought as she carefully folded the paper into a little square; she waited until the familiar hurt had settled in her stomach before she stuck the paper in between the wicker of the chair.
It’s just as bad as he is, there’s always the possibility out there of worse.
And I’ve already been so fortunate. He’s not perfect. But neither am I. No one gets perfect.