She asks Ben if Dorinda knows about her. Ben says he’s mentioned to Dorinda that he’s seeing someone, but that they’ve never discussed whom. Implying that they do still discuss some things. What things? What do they talk about? How often? How married are they? There is also another, much earlier wife: Carol, the mother of Ben’s three grown children. She lives on Martha’s Vineyard. Rebecca doesn’t know what she looks like and is not bothered by her as she is by Dorinda, though it does worry her that there are two of them, two of Ben’s former loves cast adrift in the world. Does it mean she will one day be a third? Is he a serial discarder? No, she tells herself: he is fifty-seven, he’s had a life. Rebecca is forty-five, and has a past of her own. Her quantity is equal to Ben’s: two. Steve, who had grown less and less interested in sex, and eventually told her that it would be okay with him if she wanted to go out and have an affair; and then Peter.
She has of course by now broken up with Peter, who, she thinks, barely seemed to notice. In fact, it’s Rebecca who has failed to notice. She is so far gone, so deeply drunk on love, that she doesn’t notice how surprised and hurt he is; how aware he has been over the years of his own caution and reticence; how miserably, suddenly certain he is that their long civilized mildness was fatal and largely his fault; how far from mild he is feeling now. He’s angry at her, but angrier at himself.
“We could still see each other sometimes,” she said vaguely, cravenly, at the end. (She was thinking that it had been so friendly all along, maybe it could just keep being friendly.) “I’ll miss you.”
“No. Don’t call me. Don’t call me again unless you mean it,” Peter said; and then he amended it to: “Don’t call me.”
It was very clear and clean, Rebecca thought at the time. They had met for a cup of coffee in Harvard Square, and they were done and she was walking home within fifteen minutes. She was relieved that there hadn’t been a scene, but also not surprised. She did feel sad: she would miss him. She passed the store that sold the chocolate eggs and went in and bought one to hide somewhere—Ben’s slipper, the piano bench. They’ve taken to stashing them all over his house for each other to find.
What does Harriet make of all this? Nothing. Rebecca hasn’t told her. She doesn’t know what Harriet would say, but she knows she doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t want to hear anything from anybody.
She wants to be utterly alone with Ben: she wants to drink him, eat him, climb inside him, run away with him. She’s never felt this way about anyone.
What she has always thought, watching friends of hers disappear into similar love affairs in the past, is, “Uh-oh.”
But who is ever able to apply to her own current love affair a word like similar?
She gets calls from the nursing home. “I’m just calling to report that your mother fell this morning. She slid down out of her wheelchair. She wasn’t hurt.”
“We’re calling to let you know that your mother is in the emergency room. She has a pretty high fever, and the doctor was worried she might be dehydrated.”
She calls Harriet. “Mom?”
Harriet says she’s okay, or she’s tired, or she’s mad that they didn’t take action sooner, or she knows they’re short-staffed and that it’s not their fault, or that they’re a bunch of stupid uncaring assholes who just want her money. Rebecca murmurs and soothes, gets indignant, calls the nursing home to complain, suggests to Harriet yet again that they hire a private aide to keep a closer eye on her (which Harriet has always refused to do, because the nursing home is already gobbling up her money and once it’s gone she’ll have to go on Medicaid and have a roommate, the idea of which she finds abhorrent).
Rebecca has always been competent whenever there’s a crisis—but it’s different now, more automatic, because she has Ben. When something happens with Harriet, she does what needs to be done, but it feels more like Honor Thy Mother than it does like running into a burning building to save someone you love who is trapped inside.
“And you’re sure you don’t want me to look for a place near Boston?” Rebecca asks.
No, Harriet always says, because of Ralph.
She talks to Cath occasionally, and Cath says, from the safe distance of Denver, “It’s time for her to live closer to one of us.”
(Rebecca is tempted sometimes to say, Okay, Cath, I’ve arranged to have Mom med-flighted out to you.)
Harriet gets a urinary tract infection, another leg infection, bronchitis.
She has been sick now for so long, this has all been going on forever. Rebecca wishes it would all just stop—but the only thing that will stop it is Harriet’s death, and she doesn’t want that.
She asks Harriet one afternoon—it’s when Harriet is in the hospital with bronchitis, and Rebecca has driven down to Connecticut to spend the afternoon with her (just the afternoon: she wants to be back in Cambridge again by bedtime)—“Aren’t you tired of all this?”
“Yes,” Harriet says. “But I don’t want it to be over, because I want to know the end of the story.”
“What story?” Rebecca asks.
“All the stories,” Harriet says.
“You’re so sad,” Ben says, rubbing the backs of his fingers against her cheek when she gets home from the bookstore one evening.
“My mother’s in the hospital again. Septic shock. Another urinary tract infection, which I guess they didn’t catch fast enough. I’m going to drive down there tomorrow.”
“I’ll make you a drink,” he says, and then he calls her one of the incredibly silly pet names, which for the first time fails to delight her. It seems irritating and ill-timed. “And then I’ll run you a bath,” he says.
“A bath sounds good.”
“And I’ll come watch you take it.”
“Come talk to me, you mean?”
“No. Watch you.”
That’s an aberration, not a revelation, she thinks. Being objectified, when she just wants to be accompanied.
“You’re so sad,” he keeps saying. It starts as sympathy. A week or two later it’s cool, a diagnosis. Then it becomes a criticism.
He starts wanting the underwear to be kinkier. And he wants her to wear it every time.
He used to talk a lot about divorcing Dorinda. But it’s been months now since he mentioned it.
Rebecca asks him about it one night, as they are lying in bed, happy, she thinks, naked, with scraps of underwear scattered all around them.
“I would love to marry you,” she says, with a boldness that is new and luxurious for her. She’s echoing something he has said to her many times by now. “I hate it that you’re still married to someone else.”
He is silent. Then he says: “You knew I was married when we started this.”
She tries to get out of it without too much self-abasement. She knows the uselessness of asking questions. She manages to sound less desperate than she is—but still, it’s more desperate than she would like to sound.