Broken Homes & Gardens Page 8

  She fell asleep sitting up, surrounded by papers and open books. A knock at her door, just a persistent tapping, jostled her awake. She looked at the clock—a quarter to midnight. She stood up, letting papers flutter to the floor, and shuffled over to the door. Two huge dark eyes blinked at her through the peephole. She unlocked the door, opened it, and flopped back on her bed.

  Malcolm let himself in. “Oh, were you asleep?” He walked over to her bed and began gathering up her books and papers.

  “Hey—” she started, but then stopped. She’d have to go through it all tomorrow anyway.

  He sat down on the edge of her bed, forcing her to scoot over to make room for him. He flung his arm around her shoulder.

  “How was the big date?” she asked, inching away from him. She closed her eyes, feigning tiredness and boredom.

  “Good,” he said.

  “Okay. So I take it you like Allison now.”

  “Do you want me to like Allison?”

  She opened her eyes to glare at him. “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing. Yeah. I like her. She’s funny.”

  “That’s what she said about you.”

  “Hey, Joanna?” He nudged himself closer to her.

  “What?”

  “You can be our bridesmaid if we get married.”

  She punched him in the arm. “No thanks.”

  “I love it when you’re jealous,” he said, kissing her temple.

  She pushed him away from her, angry now. “Is that why you’re with Allison now? To make me jealous? Why? I mean, what’s the point?”

  “Come on, Joanna. That’s not how it was.”

  “Allison is a good friend of mine. If I had known you were going to just use her like this—”

  Malcolm was shaking his head at her. “You practically set me up with her. Now you’re mad?”

  “I just—” She felt a tingling sensation in her nose. She took a deep breath, staving off the urge to burst into tears. She didn’t continue her thought, left her words hanging.

  They were silent for several minutes. She turned away from him and climbed under the covers. “Are you staying here?” she said.

  She heard him get up, take off his coat and shoes. He lay down next to her and wrapped his arms around her waist. She held still and closed her eyes. After a few minutes, he skimmed his hand down her thigh, then back up again. Up and down, gently, almost lulling her to sleep. Then his hand strayed from its course, reached between her legs. She stopped him—laced her fingers between his and settled their hands in the warmth of her stomach. Then she fell asleep.

  8

  yesterday’s clothes

  Joanna sat on the swings at the playground, kicking cedar mulch around with her foot. She’d been waiting for Laura to meet her for ten minutes. Finally, her sister opened the doors at the back of the elementary school where she taught sixth grade. She walked across the blacktop, around the rainbow-colored playground equipment, and sat on a swing next to Joanna, giving an exaggerated sigh of relief. “Conferences,” Laura said. “Sorry I couldn’t meet you until now.” It was almost five o’clock and the sky was darkening.

  “You’re the one who wanted to meet,” said Joanna.

  Laura wasn’t looking at her—she was peering out over the soccer field as if she were searching for someone. No one was around. Joanna shivered. Perhaps Laura wanted to announce a pregnancy—what else could be so urgent, require a secret meeting on a swing set at sundown? But Laura didn’t look as if she were bursting with good news.

  “Okay, Joanna, I’m just going to say it. I am not sure if this is even going to bother you or not, but I figured you might hear about it from someone else, and I didn’t want that to happen.”

  “Just say it,” Joanna said, trying not to panic at the sight of Laura wringing her hands and biting her bottom lip. An absurd thought entered her head: Laura had killed someone and needed Joanna to help her hide the body.

  “Okay, so Ted stopped by the store last night, and he ran into Nate.”

  She laughed. “Is that what this is all about? Laura, really—”

  Laura held up a hand, silencing her. “So they get to talking, and Ted’s just making small talk, but then Nate tells him that he’s selling the house, moving back to Seattle.”

  “Really?” This was unexpected, but she could hardly claim to care. She hadn’t even seen Nate since they’d broken up three months earlier.

  “And, uh—” Laura said, “he told Ted that he’s getting married.”

  “Married? Well—what a surprise.”

  “I’m sorry,” Laura said.

  “Why? I think it’s great. Nate and I are friends. Why would it bother me if one of my friends got married?” Nate would probably not qualify as a “friend” under the loosest of definitions. The last night she had spent in his house, a couple days after they had officially split, he had suggested they have “break-up sex” for “closure.” After he had collapsed on top of her, panting with loud, ragged breaths, he had asked her if they could still be friends. She saw now that she’d agreed just so she could get him off of her. And out of her.

  Laura appeared skeptical.

  Joanna was gazing down at her feet, still kicking mulch. The top layer was dry, but as she dug her toe into the ground, she unearthed some darker, dirtier wood chips, wet from old rain. She could even smell it—rain, dirt, and decomposing wood.

  She felt fine. Calm, even. “Thanks for telling me,” she said. “I’ll have to send him a crystal vase or a toaster.” Joanna pushed off on the swing, pumping a few times until she was high enough to jump out, then landed in front of Laura. “Okay, I’ve got to go now.” She crossed the soccer field at an unnaturally brisk pace, her sister calling after her.

  For several blocks she simply walked with no destination. She didn’t want to go home. The soles of her shoes hit the pavement with angry slaps. She didn’t know what her problem was. She certainly didn’t care if Nate got married.

  After walking four or five more blocks, she found herself at Malcolm’s apartment. The windows were dark. She looked up and down the street, as if she expected him to emerge from the shadows. “Malcolm,” she whispered into her phone, “call me as soon as you get this. It’s urgent.” She sat on the steps outside his apartment building for a few minutes, tapping her foot on the cement. Then she went home.

  She took off her coat and scarf and tossed them on the floor upon entering her apartment. When Malcolm still didn’t pick up his phone, she called Allison. Joanna had been avoiding both of them since the night he came over to her place a few weeks ago. As soon as Allison picked up, Joanna rushed in with her story about Nate. “He must be marrying Melissa. He must be.”

  “Oh my god,” Allison said. “I feel terrible that I ever introduced the two of you.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “You know what you should do?” her friend asked.

  “What?”

  “Call him.”

  “I have no desire to ever speak to him again.”

  “Don’t you want to know what he was thinking? Don’t you want to just … tell him off?”

  Allison was right. Joanna ended the call and dialed Nate’s number before losing her nerve. She pressed her hand to her chest. He answered on the first ring.

  “Hey,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

  “Yeah.” Her voice was low, steady. “So, I heard you ran into Ted.”

  “Yeah,” said Nate.

  “And he said you were moving.”

  “If I can sell this place.”

  “Moving back to Seattle?”

  “Listen, Joanna.” She could hear some uneasiness in Nate’s voice. “Maybe I could come over? I could explain everything.”

  “I want to hear it now.”

  “Okay,” he said, but then didn’t elaborate.

  “So you’re getting married?” She felt too keyed-up to sit down. Instead she paced back and forth in front of the strip of kitchen. />
  “Listen, Joanna, I didn’t tell you because I wasn’t sure you’d find out anyway. What was the point? But yeah …”

  “Who’s the lucky girl?” She attempted a light-hearted lilt to her voice but knew it came out bitter-sounding. On the other end of the line, he sighed.

  “I don’t expect you to be happy about this. But Melissa and I—”

  “How did this even happen? We broke up at the end of January!”

  Nate was silent for so long that Joanna thought the connection had broken. For the second time that day she had a prescient flash of insight right before she heard confirmation. “Well, last Christmas—”

  “Christmas!” Joanna screamed into the phone. She was shaking. Until those last few miserable weeks with Nate, they’d rarely argued. They had never been passionate enough about anything to raise their voices in anger at each other. There was no yelling, swearing, or dish-throwing in their household, no matter how annoyed they might have been with each other.

  Nate tried to explain how it had “just happened” when he went home for Christmas and found Melissa staying at his house. Seeing each other made them understand that they had never fallen out of love. Breaking up and moving away hadn’t changed anything. “Except it wasn’t so simple,” Nate said. “I had you. I told her I couldn’t just leave you like that.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  Nate ignored her. “So, we decided to put our feelings on hold. I said I was going to go back to you, see if I could make things work. She made me promise to come back in a month no matter what, to help her move. Well, then you and I weren’t getting along at all and I was sure that I’d go back to Seattle for good—and then you ended up going back there with me—”

  “Because you asked me to. Nate, why didn’t you just break up with me? That was the plan, right? Whatever happened to ending it before it got messy?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. She could picture him exactly, sitting on the floor of the living room in the house they used to share. Surrounded by boxes and Star Wars figurines, a dumb, helpless expression on his too-handsome Ken-doll face.

  “Just tell me one thing.” She stopped pacing and sat down on her bed, deflated. “Did you have sex with Melissa? While we were together I mean.”

  His hesitation answered her question. She hung up before she could hear his response and then threw her phone across the room. She needed to do something.

  When was the last time she had vacuumed? It had probably been over a month. It seemed so futile to run a vacuum over such a small patch of carpet. The color was a strange mauve shade that hid all sorts of crumbs and fragments, providing little motivation to keep it clean. She wrestled the vacuum cleaner out of the closet, plugged it in, and ran it over the rug. Then she used one of the attachments to vacuum the covers on her bed and the upholstery on her chair. She felt like a demented housewife. If only she had on an apron and high heels. Maybe a string of pearls.

  After rearranging her spice rack, polishing each jar with a sudsy cloth, Joanna went to call Malcolm again and saw that he’d already tried to call her back sometime during the cleaning spree. “Where have you been?” she said into the phone, so relieved to hear his voice at last that she almost started crying. Tears welled up in her eyes, but she willed them back.

  “Work,” he said. “What’s this urgent news you had to tell me?”

  After listening to her hysterical rant for a few minutes, he interrupted her. “I’ll come get you,” he said. “Don’t do anything desperate.”

  He arrived to find her sitting in a heap in the middle of her bed, tears streaming down her face, cutting up photographs of Nate into tiny pieces.

  “What happened to you?” Malcolm said when he saw her blotchy, red face. He sat on the edge of her bed and extended a hand to her. She took it and let him pull her over next to him. He handed her a tissue and she blew her nose. “I mean, you don’t want to be with him anymore, right?”

  “No.”

  “And you never thought you were going to marry the guy.”

  “So, you’re saying I shouldn’t be upset? That because I didn’t marry Nate—or want to marry Nate—that was like a free pass for him to shit all over our relationship?” Malcolm held up his hands in defense. She was no longer crying. “Look, we’d been in 100 percent agreement about how it would end, and this was not how it was supposed to go. It was like the two years of my life with this guy were a joke. He didn’t respect me. He lied.”

  Malcolm stayed quiet for a moment, and then he gave her leg a little pat. “Come on. Wash your face. I’ll take you out to dinner.”

  She hadn’t eaten a thing since lunch. When she thought back at herself at lunchtime, eating that peanut butter and honey sandwich on whole wheat bread, it was like glimpsing into the distant past—a past in which she didn’t know what Nate had been up to since their breakup and didn’t care. She was starving.

  In the bathroom she saw that Malcolm had understated the awfulness of her appearance. Her whole face was hot and red, her eyes puffy and swollen. Her junior year of college had been a weepy one, necessitating elaborate rituals involving frozen spoons and hot washcloths. She no longer kept spoons in the freezer—a washcloth would have to suffice. She soaked one with hot water, wrung it out, almost burning her hands, and unfolded it over her face. She breathed in, deeply, inhaling the warm, clean scent, and pressed down on her eyeballs with the heels of her hands. She repeated the procedure three times, ending with cold water.

  Malcolm was still sitting on the edge of the bed, engrossed in one of her composition textbooks. He looked up when the bathroom door opened. “Much better,” he said.

  The night was clear, warmer than usual for April, and people were walking along the sidewalks, darting into bars and restaurants, laughing and talking. She had one of those moments in which she realized that her problems were just that—her own. Life went on whether Nate was marrying Melissa or not. He had wronged her. No one cared but her.

  Malcolm put his arm around her shoulders as they walked along the street in search of a restaurant. He led her into a dark wine bar that served elaborate appetizers and desserts. Sinking into a soft velvet chair, she let him order a cheese plate and a bottle of wine. She had already attacked the breadbasket, devouring what must have been an entire baguette.

  “Look, Joanna,” he started as she stuffed a huge hunk of bread in her mouth and chewed. “Nate is obviously an asshole.” She was still chewing, so he continued. “This is the best thing that could have possibly happened. He’s moving to Seattle—you’ll never have to see him again. And now—hey—you’ll never be tempted to get back together with him.” She started shaking her head, but she was still working on the chunk of bread she’d stuffed in her mouth. She wanted to say that she had never considered getting back together with him in the first place.

  She swallowed her bread and took a large gulp of wine. Then she went ahead and polished off the glass. He narrowed his eyes at her. “Feel better? Hey—that’s enough for you.”

  She offered him a weak smile. “I don’t know why I’m so upset.”

  Malcolm nodded slowly. “Yes you do.”

  He led her to his apartment after dinner. She hadn’t been back there since they were snowed in together last Christmas. They sat on Malcolm’s bed to watch a movie in the dark. Joanna wormed her way under the covers and leaned against his arm. An hour into the movie, the tears started streaming down her face again. “Maybe we should have gotten a comedy,” she said.

  “This is a comedy.” There was nothing intrinsically sad about the story, but she was suffering right along with the characters as they bumbled their way around the television screen. He turned towards her, wiped away her tears with the sleeve of his shirt. “Joanna,” he said, “come on.”

  “You know what the worst part is?” she asked, and then didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s not that he cheated. Or that he’s marrying her—his ex-fiancée! That kind of thing happens all the time.”

  “W
ell, still—”

  “It’s that I went to Seattle with him.” Joanna’s tears had stopped flowing. She wiped them off her face with the back of her hand. “I helped her move. I spent hours assembling her dresser.” Joanna shook her head in disgust, then flung herself on the bed and bent into fetal position. “I’m such an idiot.”

  Malcolm curled up behind her and patted her thigh. “You should have asked me—I would have told you how stupid it was to go over there with him.”

  Joanna managed a rueful little smile. “Thanks.”

  “Happy to help.” After several minutes, Malcolm’s hand went from petting to caressing.

  “Why do we always end up like this?” Joanna said, and he inched closer.

  “Mmm.” His hand traveled over her clothes, up to her breasts—where they lingered for a few moments—then back down to her hips.

  She took in a sharp breath when his lips brushed against the back of her neck.

  “Turn around,” he said, his voice low. And she did.

  He took her face in his hands and kissed her. They pressed their bodies against each other, parted only long enough to undo buttons—“so many buttons,” he muttered—or toss unwanted clothing onto the floor. She wrapped her arms around him and he brought her close to him, until his bare skin touched hers. For once his hands felt warm, right down to his fingertips.

  The next morning Joanna woke up alone in his bed under a tangle of crumpled covers. She squinted in the daylight until she could make out Malcolm sitting next to an open window. He was watching her. She couldn’t read his expression. He had his usual rolled-out-of bed look with his dark eyes and unshaven face. He was fully dressed in jeans and a dark brown sweater she had never seen before.

  “I’ll make you breakfast if you want,” he said tonelessly.

  “Okay.”

  She waited until she heard the pots and pans clanging around the kitchen before reaching for her clothes, doing her best to smooth out the wrinkles with her hands, while he made scrambled eggs and toast. They ate in silence. She wished she could take a shower, brush her teeth, find something else to wear. She wanted to touch him again—or she wanted him to touch her. He reached for the salt and sprinkled it over his eggs, his hair falling over his eyes. If only they had stayed in bed a little longer, with the curtains closed, clinging together in the dark. Instead she had to teach a class in an hour wearing yesterday’s clothes.