Chapter Forty-One #4
He closes the laptop and kisses my forehead.
“All right, babe. You’re good.” We go to bed and for the next three hours, until Holden cries and Roman gets up to give him a bottle (without me asking), we talk.
We talk more than we’ve talked since Holden was born.
We talk about things other than deductibles and layoffs and taxes.
The words “401(k),” “nanny,” and “sleep training” are never uttered.
I ask how it started between him and Daisy.
The first time she stood us up at the park, Roman got suspicious.
The next day, he called in sick, followed us (or me) all the way uptown to 527 Park.
He watched me walk right past security as if I lived there.
He talked his way in. He watched me drop Holden off with Marcela at the play center.
Marcela, Holden’s nanny. Not Daisy. He followed me upstairs, to the eighty-seventh floor, and he watched me walk into the apartment in his baggy jeans and then peek my head out wearing a flowing chiffon caftan, greeting a couple of moms with a slight affect.
He watched, in real time, as I transformed, shed Emily, a pile of denim and dreariness, on the floor, and out stepped Daisy, this new, sexier, carefree person.
His wife no longer his wife, but a dangerous seductress daring him—daring everyone in the condo—to follow.
He waited in the hallway for five hours until I finally came out, my eyes dazed.
He tried to confront me—“Babe? Emily? You want to tell me what the hell’s going on?
”—but I’d put a finger over his lips. I role-played as Daisy, pushed him to do things we’d never done before, as long as he never talked about it with Emily.
Or anyone. That was our deal. That was how we found our way back to each other.
Was it really that different from what I’d done during my PT appointments? I’d gone to a place outside myself. We both had.
The first time Daisy took Roman to the penthouse, he’d been hesitant.
He’d kissed me (or her?) with a hollow distance, afraid he’d hurt Emily.
But I wasn’t Emily then. Why couldn’t he understand that?
All right, all right, “Daisy,” he’d called me, sticking his fingers inside me just like he did in the taxi the first night we met.
His eager mouth. His light touch until I pushed his head between my legs and he looked up at me, ravenous, as if I weren’t Emily at all.
The primal sounds he made, the slack expression, filled with a new type of pleasure, when I flipped him over and went down on him.
We didn’t have sex, not at first, but we woke up with soiled sheets several hours later.
I went back downstairs to the eighty-seventh floor, put Emily’s clothes back on, collected Holden, and made the long trek downtown.
Roman had clutched my hips in the kitchen and said, “Yesterday, yeah, that was something,” and I’d had no idea what he was talking about, too busy looking for the missing chupete.
For weeks, the early evenings after work went on like that.
“It was so nice,” he says. “Our love nest in the clouds.”
I burrow into the fleshy part of his chest, the closest I can get to living in there. “So you don’t think I’m crazy?”
“You? Never. You are totally normal. Not proper mad at all. I actually dated another girl with the same whole secret porn-star-escort thing going on. It’s a lot more common in Australia than you realize.” I elbow him.
After we’ve told each other everything, we’ve actually run out of things to say.
We aren’t used to talking, much less running out of things to say.
After a while, we both start to half giggle.
Break the silence! No, you. He rolls on his side, facing me.
He reaches out to shake my hand. “Hello, wife. I’m Roman. Your husband, remember?”
I reach to shake his hand. “Oh, right. Didn’t we get hitched?”
“Indeed we did.”
I smile. “Hi, husband.”
We lie there like that, hand in hand, touching again. I roll on my side, secure again in his arms, and as we both close our eyes, I say, “It caught the cum.”
Roman is half asleep. “What?”
“The mason jar.”
He holds me tighter until we drift to sleep.
—
Holden cries. It’s a little before six a.m. The sirens have given way to the roar of a bulldozer outside.
I mix Earth’s Best baby oatmeal with organic blueberries.
I wipe the counter and stuff last night’s Greek takeout into the trash.
I prepare a bottle. Then I see it: blue block letters on the plastic bag staring back at me.
Stavros’s Greek Restaurant. I lean closer to the trash, my stomach tilting.
Daisy’s voice in my head, the day we reunited in the park—“Anyhoo, then I meet this Greek guy, Stavros. Yacht, Mykonos, you know. He put me up in an apartment. 527 Park.”
The bottle slips from my hand. Explodes on the kitchen floor, milk spreading fast.
Roman comes out of the shower, wet hair, late for work. Quarter end and all. He doesn’t notice the mess, kisses both of us, already halfway out the door. “Penelope’s place again soon, I hope?”
I look at him, pulse racing. “What did you say?”
“The love nest. You know, the condo, Penelope’s apartment.”