Tyler also knew what he ought to make himself for dinner. He was a big boy and had lived on his own for many years before they met. He had called her to send a message. Although their conversation was brief, and polite, he was in effect telling her: I’m home now and you should be, too.
But she wasn’t home and she wasn’t coming home. Not tonight. See, two could play at this game of being absent without leave. He thought he could come and go as he pleased and she was supposed to stay home and play wifey, but she was done with that. It was over. Certainly, she would make it look good for public consumption – for instance, she was organizing their annual Halloween party as she always did – but privately, she would make him feel how she felt.
Katie’s mother went on. ‘I mean, it seems like every few days you’re sleeping over here, and I doubt it’s for my benefit. If you’re having these sorts of problems, maybe you should go into counseling together.’
She looked at her mother, really soaking her in. She was a woman in her late fifties. She was careful about sun exposure. She drank eight glasses of pure spring water a day. She followed a mainly vegetarian diet, though she wasn’t a fanatic about it. At Katie’s insistence, she had taken up yoga about ten years ago, and had retained some of her youthful flexibility and strength. Her eyes were bright and alert, even after a few drinks. About the only obvious clue to her age were the crow’s feet around her eyes, and the wrinkles on her forehead and neck – she refused to consider plastic surgery, though many women she knew had already gone for it two or three times.
Still, Katie’s father had died five years earlier and his death had taken its toll. Her Mom she wasn’t as vigorous as before – wasn’t quite the queen of the ball she had once been. She had diminished without him, and had become thinner and more fragile. She was still passionate about gardening, and about her charity work. She still lived life and gave herself to it. If anything about her had outwardly changed, it was that she no longer traveled the way she and Katie’s father had loved to do together. But that was par for the course now anyway – few people were traveling like they once had. Even so, her mother was getting older, and it was happening right in front of Katie’s eyes. She could almost picture her mother in another ten years, and she didn’t like what she saw.
‘Mom, would Dad have ever gone to marital counseling?’
‘Well, we never needed counseling, as far as I know.’
‘That’s not really my point. My point is, would he have gone?’
Her mother gave a gentle shake of her head. ‘I don’t think certain men of your father’s generation would go in for that kind of thing. Many did, but some men were holdovers from an earlier time. They weren’t very touchy-feely. They held their pain inside and didn’t talk much about it.’
Katie took a sip of her Margarita. It was fruity and delicious. She was about to score one on her mother and took the time to savor it. ‘Exactly my point. Tyler is a man from Dad’s generation, and I’d say he qualifies as a holdover from an earlier time. Like maybe the Great Depression.’
Her mother made a pained expression. ‘I’m not the one who told you to marry a man your father’s age.’
‘Nobody told me to do it. He’s the man I fell in love with.’
‘Well, for God’s sake, Katie. A younger man, a more modern man, would be better able to deal emotionally with the problem you’ve had. A younger man would be more open about it, would be more willing to talk about it, and then maybe the two of you could move on from being stuck in this place.’
‘Mom…’
Her mother held up a thin hand. To Katie, this was the first indication that her Mom had crossed the line from tipsy to drunk. ‘No, I’m going to say it. Tyler wanted to have children, his own children. He wanted to have them with you. But you can’t have children, and what’s worse, you can’t have them because of your own flagrant behavior. OK, you were young, but that doesn’t change the facts. You ruined your body by sleeping around.’
‘Jesus, Mom,’ Katie said. What she thought was: Fuck you, Mom.
‘It’s true, isn’t it? How is an old-fashioned person like Tyler supposed to deal with that? He can’t talk about it. He probably can’t even think about it without getting upset. Personally, I think your marriage is doomed.’
With that, she stood on unsteady legs and gathered their glasses. ‘Are you having another drink?’ It came out ferociously, almost an accusation.
‘Sure, why not?’ Katie said. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
Her mother went inside and Katie sat, watching the light begin to fade from the sky. She never watched the news, but even she knew that many people thought the world was ending. The weather was changing. The economy was collapsing and millions of people were out of work, or had lost their homes. None of these hardships had touched her life, but she felt them somehow, like they were all around her, in the air she breathed, on the empty highways she drove, in the gated communities where she and her mother both lived.
And she had her own hardships, didn’t she? It was a painful thing, not being able to bear a child. She had lost that ability years ago, at the age of twenty-five, without even knowing it. Back in her Dewey Beach days she had picked up a case of gonorrhea. Worse yet, she apparently had it for months before any symptoms appeared. Even worse, she got it during a time when she was particularly active, partying too much, and she wasn’t even sure who it came from. She was horrified by it, of course. Who wouldn’t be horrified by a foul-smelling, painful discharge coming from their body, especially that part of their body? But she had gone to a medical clinic and a round of antibiotics had knocked it out in a few days. Katie was good at forgetting unpleasant facts, and a short time later it seemed that the whole episode had happened to somebody else.
Then, two years ago, she had miscarried a baby. It was early into the pregnancy, less than two months. These things happened. Then, last year, it had happened again. A battery of tests quickly revealed something she hadn’t even suspected. Her uterus had been scarred by the gonorrhea. As a result, her pregnancies were ectopic – meaning the fetus lodged each time in one of her fallopian tubes, and grew there for a little while. But the tubes were too narrow. They weren’t designed for growing a baby, so her body expelled the fetus in self-defense. This was one impromptu anatomy lesson that she hadn’t wanted to learn.
The good news was that there was no threat to her overall health, and she could enjoy a normal, active sex life with a willing partner. The bad news was that she could never carry a baby to term. The worst news was that there was no way to explain her past to Tyler in a way that would make sense to him, or that he could accept. She had never felt like a whore before – not until the day they found out why she couldn’t have a baby, and not until she looked into her husband’s eyes.
She remembered how some weeks afterward he wasn’t home one night, and she wandered the big house, thinking that she might start cleaning. Instead she poured herself a glass of wine and went into the living room. She sat on the leather sofa across from Tyler’s chair. She could see the indentations his body had made. It was like he was sitting there, invisible. When the grandfather clock chimed nine, she began to cry. There wasn’t much force behind the tears, and she regained herself. Maybe she was reaching the point where she was all cried out. She hoped so.
She remembered another time when he left the bed in the middle of the night. She padded down the stairs, looking for him. She found him in the living room, slouched in his chair, whiskey glass in hand. His eyes were open, staring straight ahead. He looked up when she came to the doorway. Those eyes were hard. She saw no caring there, no warmth, just cold intelligence measuring her. He could have been a creature from an alien race, come to take specimens back home. He stared at her a long time.