Angle of Pursuit, page 19
“I’m your aunt, then,” she told him, her voice choked. “So you’ll have me, too. We’re going to have the best Thanksgiving ever!” She talked very excitedly about holidays and various future plans for the summer when Parker could go over to swim at her house (which was, of course, my former cottage). But he didn’t know that, so he got exited too and it was actually kind of cute how the two of them got along. Sissy was more of an age to be an older sibling to him, not an aunt, but he needed people. And if she said that they would hang out, that she would get him into Wonderwomen rehearsals and teach him how to do a handspring, then she would. She was the kind of person who stuck to what she said, which was something I’d always admired about my sister. I remembered her the year before, with all the terrible things that had happened with her ex-boyfriend and a foot injury that wouldn’t heal, and how she’d kept on chugging through.
“What are you thinking about?” Robby asked me. He was rapidly eating the plate of food (a large plate; more like a platter) that I’d kept warm for him in the oven. I’d marked it with a message for Parker saying that one was for Robby and that his own three dinners were separate.
“Just…nothing.” Just that my sister was a good person, a nice one. I was glad that was true and sorry she’d spent her life trying to imitate me, when I wasn’t.
“This is delicious,” he told me, and swallowed another large mouthful before he glanced over at Sissy again. “How did she end up coming over?”
“I worked with her group of Wonderwomen tonight. She wanted to talk, I guess.”
“Then I’ll take Parks—”
“No, no, no,” I said quickly. “I don’t want his routine to get disrupted.” And also, I could tell that my sister had more questions for me about my new living arrangement, probably more about Robby, and definitely more about our stupid dad. I hadn’t spoken to him since our argument on his temp-wife’s patio, when he’d called me selfish and I’d said that his marriage wouldn’t last. I just didn’t have the energy to start defending myself about any of it.
Pretty soon, though, she seemed to realize that if Robby was home, her husband would be getting back to their place as well. They were still in the love-all-the-time phase of marriage; I’d seen friends go through that too, a period of time in which they were crazy to be together just like when they’d first started dating.
I tried to think back and recall if I’d gone through that phase myself, or if Billy had. I didn’t remember being anything but worried when we’d first gotten married, with my company already in the hole and the wedding expenses like another black cloud hovering over me. I’d even woken up with my heart pounding, not able to breathe, on our honeymoon. And my husband? I hadn’t given him much thought, but I didn’t remember him as very happy, either. He hadn’t been very interested in sex after the wedding, I did recall that, but I’d been too stressed to even pretend to want to do it, either. I hadn’t asked about his reasons.
My sister did get me to promise that we would meet again sometime soon, very soon, when Parker was in school and I wasn’t working. “What are you doing right now, anyway?” she asked and that was a good question, just not one I was willing to answer.
“I have a lot of irons in the fire,” I said. “Talk to you soon.” I went to my bedroom to watch and make sure she made it out to her car, a new one that her new husband must have bought. It was very nice.
When I came back into the living room, Parker and Robby were having a discussion about homework. Namely, Parker didn’t want to do it, but I stepped in and enforcement occurred. As I’d said, I’d never had a problem with making people mad at me—in fact, it happened a lot.
With Parker settled in his bedroom and reading his book again, it left me and Robby together. Alone. We hadn’t been, not very much, since Parker and I had driven in from Chicago. I was working and full-time parenting, and for him, the football season was just so busy. He was doing something almost constantly—practices were just the beginning, because they also had meetings, lifting sessions, time with the trainers, film study, and more, and more. It was exhausting for me to watch, and I’d never really been much of a slacker myself. In college, I’d always had one job that I had admitted to and then another that I’d kept a secret from my friends, like being a maid, or dishwashing, or something that they would have wrinkled their (often surgically corrected) noses at.
But now Robby was sitting on my couch with his forehead in his hand, and my immediate thought was that he had another headache. I could fix that.
“Don’t worry, it will go away soon,” I said, and climbed to sit behind him. “Here.” He jumped when I touched his neck but then I could feel him relax.
“Jesus H. Christ, that feels good,” he told me. “I don’t have a headache, though. No, don’t stop.” He put my hands back onto his shoulders. “I was just thinking about me getting all over Parks for not doing his homework. I honestly don’t believe that I opened a single book for the entire time I was in school. Ever.”
“Did you need tutors?” I asked casually.
“Maybe. It seemed like it would get to the point where a teacher or principal would realize that I had a problem, and then I’d be at a different school in a different town.”
“What do you think the problem was?” I asked, just as casually, but then I gripped his shoulders. “The words ‘dumb,’ ‘stupid,’ or ‘thick’ better not come into this conversation.”
He laughed softly. “I had trouble applying myself?” he suggested.
“No. No, no, that’s not it.”
“Oh, you’ve got me figured out?”
“I do,” I told him. This part of him was clear and obvious. “You didn’t get good basics down. It’s like trying to play in a football game before you know how to line up. Like trying to read before you know all the letters.” I was pretty sure that he’d tried to do exactly that. “Then, with you moving around all the time, it was impossible to keep up. Maybe now you should go backwards.”
“You mean, I should study the alphabet?”
I pinched his triceps. “No, not study the alphabet, but read other things besides the doughnut machine manual. Get used to that, first, and then we’ll work on your degree.”
He turned, twisting to stare at me. “What?”
“Face forward, please,” I said briskly. “I think it would be a good idea for you to finish college. You can do it, I’m positive that you can.” He didn’t need a bachelor’s degree for success, but he needed it for his own confidence. “You’re totally capable and I know it,” I said. I wanted him to know it, too.
Robby didn’t answer for a while, so I just kept rubbing his back in silence, thinking it might lull him into compliance. Finally he sat up a little straighter and spoke. “I’ll think about it.”
“Good. Because, of course, I would be here if you needed me. I would be happy to bully you into doing your work just like I do to Parker.”
He laughed again, and I was glad. “I’m sure you would,” he told me. “You don’t have a problem with that at all.”
“No, I’m comfortable in that role.”
“What about going to my game this weekend? Would you be comfortable with that?” Robby twisted again. “I got two tickets for you and Parks to sit in the stands.”
I was already shaking my head. “I can’t go.”
“Don’t you want to see the Wonderwomen do their stuff in person?” he asked. “It will be the first time they’ll try the changes you made, right?”
Yes.
“And otherwise, Parks will have to be there by himself. I know you haven’t been wanting to leave him alone.”
No. No, I hadn’t.
“And maybe you might want to see me, too,” he said. “I would like that.”
“I do watch you,” I said. “Every game, I always watch you.”
“It would be different if you were there.”
I thought about going to dance competitions and the subdued, polite claps I’d received at the end of my performances. The other girls’ moms would jump up and scream their heads off when their daughters were done—but this was different. Robby already had a whole stadium cheering for him.
“I can’t,” I said, and he nodded and turned back around. “It’s not about you,” I told him.
“Yeah, it’s all about you.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, my voice sharp.
“Maybe you were used to being the star but you’re not, not anymore.”
“I know that! You don’t have to tell me how far I’ve fallen!”
“I’m telling you that everybody has setbacks, and—”
“Setbacks?” I asked, and snorted. “I think the utter destruction of my life was a little more than that.”
“Yeah, well, now you have new stuff. A new life. What the fruck difference does it make how things were before?”
“It makes a difference to me! It makes a difference to the people I screwed over. Do you know how hard it was for me to walk in front of those cheerleaders in Danni’s basement?” I asked. “At the stadium, there will be thousands of people who feel just like those Wonderwomen, that I’m a joke and a fraud. Why would I put myself in that position? That part of my life is done,” I said. “I’m going to watch you on TV, and Parker will be ok on his own for a little while.”
We were quiet and I kept massaging, mostly hoping that it would make him sleepy and not want to discuss this anymore. But he did say, “I’ve flucked up in front of everyone at the stadium, in front of everyone watching TV in northern Michigan, in front of everyone watching in the United States. Now people in France, too, and all over Europe.”
“It’s not the same. Missing a block isn’t equal to ruining someone’s life.”
I watched him nod. “That’s what the real problem is. You talk about your company and the investors, your friend Jess, or problems you had with the Wonderwomen team, but it’s about Bill.”
“It’s everything, but it’s a lot about him.”
“Do you miss him?”
I thought about the nights that I lay in bed, wishing that someone were next to me. I thought of the idea of having someone behind you, of someone to depend on. “I do miss him,” I said. “He’s such a nice person, such a good—”
“Would it make you feel better if I tell you something about him?”
My hands stopped moving on Robby’s shoulders. “What do you mean?”
“If you knew something that he did, something that wasn’t nice and good, would that make you feel better about your divorce?” He turned again. I sat on the high arm of my couch so we were eye to eye, looking at each other. “I’m not saying that it would balance out, but he wasn’t perfect, either.”
Anger, hot as lava, replaced the blood in my veins. It erupted through my mouth as I answered Robby. “There is nothing that my husband could have done that compares to what I did to him! How could you suggest that? I humiliated him, I broke his trust!”
“Yeah, you cheated.”
“Yeah, I did.” My voice dropped. “I cheated on him and blew up our marriage but I was trying to do something good. I was trying to fix our finances and fix our lives.”
It sounded so ridiculous and histrionic. I kept talking, kept explaining. “It wasn’t like I hooked up with a guy in a bar for cash or I was standing on a street corner. I talked to one of the men on the board of North Orchard Country Club after my dad got his contact information. He wanted me to meet him at his house one evening to discuss investing in my company, or maybe even buying it. I was desperate to get out from under the debt and I remember as I drove there, I was thinking that I’d do anything.” I drew a breath and tried to calm the beating of my heart.
“Aubin, you don’t have to—”
“When I walked in, he was wearing a robe, a silk robe like that old, gross Playboy guy. I’d prepared a big presentation, a speech and graphs and spreadsheets, pictures and testimonials. But the whole time I talked, he kept leaning forward and touching my knee and the robe would fall open and I could see that he was naked underneath it.”
“You kept sitting there with him doing that? Why didn’t you leave?”
I had asked myself that so many times. “I said that I was going, that it was obvious that we had different ideas about what ‘business’ meant. I stood up and he grabbed my hand. He offered me a hundred thousand dollars if I would have sex with him.” I paused. “Did you hear me? He offered me that much. I think I was shocked for a minute and I just stared at him. He got up too and kissed me, and his lips were wet and slippery and…” I stopped talking, remembering the revulsion. “I said no. No, no, no, so he upped it. Two hundred thousand. Two hundred thousand dollars. It would have wiped out all my debt on everything. It would have been enough money to make our company something amazing. It would have changed my life. And what did I care? It was just sex. It was nothing.” I put my hand on my chest over where my heart pounded.
Robby was still looking at me, his face so close to mine. I wanted him to hear this, like I was going to punish him with it as I did to myself.
“I said that I needed the money first. He had a few thousand in cash in a drawer in his office. He held it up to show me and then I just thought, good Lord. Good Lord, I’m a prostitute. I thought about Billy and what would happen if he found out and then I thought about my sister. For our whole lives, she’d copied me and tried to do what I did. Would I have wanted her to act like this? But it was just sex. Right? How many times had I faked liking it, had I faked wanting someone? It wouldn’t have meant anything.”
He nodded slightly. “So you did it.”
“I was trying to convince myself that it would be just that once and then all my problems would have been solved. It wasn’t like I hadn’t lied before or kept things from people. I was good at that, at fooling them.”
But I shook my head. Tricking my friend and partner Jess, lying about my business to Billy and to everyone else, had been grinding me to dust. “I hadn’t been sleeping because I kept waking up with my heart racing and sometimes during the day, I’d have to pull over my car or go sit in the corner of my office and put my head between my knees because I couldn’t even breathe. I knew that I was just about to ruin everything, that I was just about to lose it all. I would look at the numbers in red in my accounting spreadsheets and it was like they were flashing, like I could see them when I closed my eyes. I was going down and I was going to take so many people with me.”
“Aubin.”
I hadn’t realized that I’d closed my eyes now, but I opened them and looked again at Robby.
“Maybe you shouldn’t say all this.”
“I don’t care anymore,” I told him, which was a lie that didn’t even sound halfway believable to my own ears. “It happened. There’s no going back now, right? He said he had a safe upstairs with more cash in it, so we went to the bedroom that he shared with his wife. Her clothes were hanging in a big closet and they had pictures of their grandchildren on the dresser. He dropped the robe and I told him no, I needed to have the money first, but he started yanking on my shirt and I thought of the promises I’d made at my wedding, that big dress I’d worn when I’d sworn to be faithful to Billy, and I…no, no, no. I said no again, no, I couldn’t.”
Robby’s dark eyebrows scrunched together. “So you didn’t—”
“He had already told me that he worked out a lot, like I cared. But he was stronger than I thought,” I explained. “He held me down. And I hadn’t brought my purse from the living room so I didn’t have my pepper spray, and I didn’t have it ready anyway because I hadn’t thought it was necessary for a business meeting. Then I just thought, there’s no reason to fight it. I’ll just let it happen and then I’ll get the money. It’s better not to fight because you could get really hurt and you’d lose anyway. Someone could put you in the hospital and then you couldn’t dance, and maybe you would lose your scholarship.”
“What—”
I shook my head. Why was I bringing that up? It had been years ago, way back in college when I’d been a waitress in the bar and walked home alone, but I didn’t even think about it anymore. “He wanted me to like it. He kept saying I had to, so I did. I acted it out, just like I’d done with my old boyfriend, faking it, and I made myself pretend it was fine, all good. Afterwards, I wanted to leave, just run, but I told him to give me what was in the safe.” I sighed. “He had lied, of course, and there was no safe. He said that he’d have the rest of my money in a few days, but I wouldn’t go without something more so he wrote me a check for another ten thousand. I don’t remember how I got home. I found myself there and I sat in the car because I couldn’t move for a while. It was a full moon that night.”
Robby was very quiet, just watching me.
“The next day, he left for Naples and I didn’t say anything, I didn’t do anything. The check bounced and I still didn’t do anything. I couldn’t even think about it and a few weeks later, he had a heart attack and died. Then I told Billy.”
“You told him that story? You said exactly what you just said to me?”
“I told him that I cheated on him for money and that I didn’t get paid anyway. And he left. He left, and I don’t blame him at all.” My last words had been almost a whisper because I was suddenly so exhausted. I’d started telling that story to punish Robby for…what? All I’d done was humiliate myself. Again.
“I better go to bed.” I swung my legs around to get off this couch but he took my wrist.
“Aubin, wait.”
I pulled it away. “No matter what you heard about my husband, it isn’t this bad, right? I don’t want to hear it, anyway. I don’t ever want to talk about this again, not any of it, because I’m over it. It’s done and I’m fine now.”
“Aubin—”
“No.” I walked into my room, to the bed I’d shared with the husband I’d betrayed, and I hoped that I would be able to sleep. But I thought it more likely that I’d stay awake and watch the moon tonight, like I had when I’d sat in the parking lot in my red BMW after everything had happened in that old man’s bedroom. I’d sat staring at the sky, gripping the hundreds in my fist, and wondering what amount would ever be enough to make me ok again.
