The next day, I went down to visit Chuck while Maggie was at her music lesson. My excuse was that I was taking Toby for a walk. He was walking, loosely speaking, beside me, and stirring up leaves that were partially decomposed, and we got to the end of the street by a series of diminishing arcs, because I was never really sure if I should be visiting Chuck at all. I was pretending to follow Toby, who hadn’t yet learned how to go in reverse—I just pointed him in the direction of Maggie’s, said “cornflakes,” and he walked.

I saw Chuck’s head moving back and forth, back and forth, in the underbrush at the back of his property before I got to the swinging gate in the split-rail fence he had put up to mark off his front yard from the Avon Man’s. As I got nearer, I could see he was carrying bundles and placing them at the base of a smoldering pile of twigs that was more smoke than blaze. I lifted Toby over the gate and then stepped over the lowest part myself, because the gate had never worked properly.

We silently entered Matheson territory and almost got to the house before Chuck heard us and turned and stared. Twigs fell from the bundle he was holding, and as we got closer, Archimedes saw the movement and broke away from his leash on the post. He clawed on the legs of Chuck’s brown corduroy pants and nearly knocked him over with the force of his lunge. Chuck kicked him away, and then I finally realized what it was about Chuck that was driving me crazy. It was the pants—his brown pants. There was a boy in the seventh grade who wore the same exact pair of pants, brown corduroys, to school. Each day, every day, for the entire year. The first few days no one noticed, of course, and treated him just like anyone else. Then, after a week, then two weeks, kids who had rashly made friends with him thinking he was normal were the first to point out the pants to others, so that they wouldn’t be lumped in with him any more by mistake. By Christmas he was an outcast, and the seat of his pants had become shiny like a burned muffin bottom. It was rumored that his parents had enough money, and Jo Anne Smolla, the nicest girl in class, suggested there might be several pairs of brown corduroys and that he changed his pants as often as anyone else, but unnoticed.

Like belling the cat, the job of chalking his belt loop in back so that there would be no mistake about the pants fell to Michael McBurney. He was the most timid boy in the class, a kid whose glasses broke when they fell off into the water fountain during recess, and who still occasionally sat at lunch with the brown corduroys because he had nothing particularly to lose. Then, by Valentine’s Day, the chalk mark was nearly rubbed off, but still clearly visible on the brown corduroy belt loop, especially when he bent over his galoshes in the cloakroom, and Michael McBurney was promoted to flipping baseball cards with the Big Three. When spring came, the pants were patched at the knee and nobody really cared any more; Michael was demoted by natural inferiority nearly back to his old status, and William Wharton, who wore the brown corduroys, skipped the eighth grade and went to Georgetown University after high school, and now he’s a brain surgeon in Chicago.

“Maggie’s not home,” he was saying, while picking up the twigs. Then he was on his knees, blowing on the fire, trying to get it restarted.

“I know. I was trying to get Toby around the block in less than an afternoon, and he seems to think cornflakes fall out of the heavens here …”

“Humph! Well! Is Jack home? I could use some help back here. I’m getting rid of this jungle so Riva won’t break her neck out here in the summer.” It’s funny how people are supposed to be certain places, and unless they stay there, where they’re supposed to be, things don’t go right. For instance, Chuck was supposed to be at work, and I was supposed to visit only Maggie at this address. So maybe I was mistaken about everything—about Chuck wanting to see me when he came over to work with Jack. Or maybe Maggie was mistaken about Chuck liking me. Or maybe I was mistaken about Maggie, or Jack. So I took Toby, who was still asking for cornflakes, home. I wasn’t sure just what was wrong, but something was.

Because Jack was away so much, Maggie eventually knew more about my life than he did, and whenever you have to rewrite history for a new person, it’s hard not to believe the new version yourself. So it was quite easy for us to plan a surprise party for my new version of Jack in June and to start fantasizing at the same time about how much fun an orgy would be, given the kinds of husbands we had in these new versions. And there was no way the new or the old Jack could ever know about it.

In fact, I think our orgy plans were the most creative things Maggie and I ever did together. We spent long hours on the phone, which I had snaked around the kitchen corner past the angel so I could talk darkly down on the cellar steps and not be heard. Our talks progressed from the kind of conversation in which we each just waited our turn to talk, to say a set piece that had been thought through many times before, following the same procedure that you used to follow for jump rope. You waited your turn to jump in, recite a rhyme, and then jump out. Then we started telling each other some less-rehearsed thoughts, until finally we had arrived at ideas that were mutually created on the spot, so dependent were they on our collaboration for their existence. The orgy was born this way.

But the surprise party was more Maggie’s idea than mine, and for reasons I couldn’t figure out at the time, Jack wasn’t surprised at all. I think the month in which a person is born does something to his personality, and that birthday party convinced me that this theory is correct. Jack had no way of knowing about it, yet even after I had hidden people behind the couches and in the coat closet, he never even tried to act surprised. I consider this blasé attitude a result of his being born when the world is lush. The months of April and May have just dumped all their riches into his birthday in June and there’s simply more and more to follow—he knows that. June expects it, and it continues, for the rest of the summer. Which explains why Jack takes everything for granted, why he always believes his ship will come in, that there’s another train if he misses this one, and now he even drives a company car. While I, born in February, am forever frostbitten, yet hopeful, because I’m near enough to spring to believe in it but too far away from it to feel its warmth. And Maggie! Maggie makes me so sickl She was born into the end of August, so for her, everything is ripe, just waiting for the picking, and the harvest is coming. She goes through life gathering, gathering, with her cheeks full.

Now, the party seemed to have been a success, in spite of Jack’s lack of surprise. I was spending a greater part of it in the kitchen, trying to get drunk, because I was feeling as if all my work had come to nothing. The real reason I had wanted to give this party at all was so Jack would appreciate me and feel obligated in some way—I wanted him to need me for something. I was finishing my second gin-and-tonic when Chuck came into the kitchen.

“Drinking alone is a mortal sin, you know,” he said, much too cheerfully for me. “And you shouldn’t be drinking this stuff—it’ll rot your insides.” Chuck, like Maggie, was pretty much what you’d expect—there is a health fad, and they join up. Maggie always says that Chuck is plain-looking compared to Jack, and she is probably right, but I found him scruffy and comfortable, like one of those booths in a college soda shop where everyone has carved his initials. And anyway, ever since Maggie called him a Formica personality, Jack’s smelled funny to me.

“Here, let me make you something you’ll like,” Chuck said, and with a flourish, he was kneeling in front of the open refrigerator and digging around in the vegetable bin for bananas, which I hate. Chuck’s always kneeling around me—maybe this is a sign. When he stood up, he was sweating across his delicate upper lip, so he took off his shirt and draped it over a chair. “Being healthy is good hard work.” He smiled, and turned to the blender, stuffing in the banana. In spite of everything I’d tried to stop thinking about him, his naked back still made me want to grab at him. It was so warm, so supple, with its broad shoulders and the muscles near his arms moving in rhythm. His curls curved down from the nape of his neck like a manicured garden path and up from his belt like a black puff of smoke. I got my drink back from the drainboard and downed it before he even turned around.

“Here, try some of this,” he said, and poured a yellowish slush from the blender into a plastic highball glass.

“What’s in it?” I asked, because he expected me to, and stuck my finger in the foam and licked it off, because he expected me to do that, too. The most exciting part is walking out to the dance floor and waiting while the music plays, knowing you can start if you want to. We tease each other as a kind gesture, sensing that our mates are not tearing down any doors to keep us apart.

“Don’t worry about what’s in it—just drink it. It’s good for you—it’ll put hair on your chest.” I looked at his chest, naturally, which was smooth and tanned, just two round nipples breaking up the wide expanse of skin.

“So what’s it done for you lately?”

He smiled, his teeth as white as they were straight. “Let me show you sometime.”

I sensed a new level of the tease. Was something up? And so, just for insurance, I dumped a big plop of gin into the drink and the first sip stung as if it were medicine. Maggie came in to check on the ice and asked me to take the cake out of the freezer in ten minutes, all without looking at Chuck. He began chopping the limes while she was talking to me, smashing the knife into them with a great vigor, until they were just a green pulp when she left. Poor Chuck! There is something so pathetic and inviting about a man who is married, worse, second-married, and worse still, Open Married. He seems like a bull with three little picador swords bleeding from his neck.

Finally, the gin was beginning to work and the room was starting its comfortable blur around the edge. Chuck was lining up the plastic glasses on the counter, and he bumped into me when he leaned over the trash can, and then when he closed the refrigerator he softly brushed my arm. I felt the hairs stand up like fur stroked the wrong way and the gargoyle smile in my palm throbbed gently. I sipped again, for the courage to push him past teasing me. Jack came in with an empty glass and two bottles of wine under his arm. He kissed me on the forehead, which he never does when we’re alone.

“So we meet again,” he said to me, or to the stove against which I was leaning. “Why don’t you come out and talk to Maggie—she’s all upset about something.” I watched him put the bottles in the refrigerator, carefully laying them down with their labels up, so that they were beside some of the salad that I keep for Maggie when she comes over hungry. He brushed a speck off the nearest bottle—Jack’s the neatfreak, not me, by the way.

“So you’re enjoying your party?” I asked him.

“Maggie and you have really knocked yourselves out.”

“Maggie and me? Maggie and me? Don’t you have your order a little screwed up?” When he blushed, which he hardly ever does, I knew I’d hit pay dirt, even if I didn’t want to. There was definitely something up. Chuck was breathing so hard that we both could hear him, and when I looked over at him, he was doing deep knee bends against the counter. Jack looked at him and he straightened up, his face red.

“Let me freshen your drink,” Chuck said, reaching across Jack, and when he took my glass he didn’t touch his fingers to mine.

Jack was getting angry, so he smiled. “Why don’t you bring your drink out to the living room—it looks as if you’re hiding in here, you two.” He was pouring some Dubonnet into a curved glass, a real glass, and then he sliced a half moon of lemon peel and carefully twisted it over the wine, letting the oil spray all over the golden surface, and then he dropped the spiral into the liquid.

“Whose drink?”

“Maggie’s of course,” I said to no one in particular, and then sipped twice at my drink and waited until Jack left the room before starting the timer for the cake. The gin was starting to slow me down, to make me more aware of the movement around me, to give me the power to speak over the ticking. It even started to taste better. It made me less worried, more objective, at least in the beginning. The second drink is always easier than the first, and the third is positively a pleasure. I dumped my used ice cubes and limes into the garbage and opened the cabinet for a real glass, too. I never cry. The last time I ever did was when I swallowed an ice cube whole and Aunt Ruth scalded her hands in the hottest water from the faucet and laid them against my throat to stroke the diamond edges into meltng faster. “Crying’s only going to make it hurt more,” she said, frantic. I want the same things that Maggie has.

I made myself a new drink very carefully and concentrated on Chuck’s hands and tried to see if I could get him to touch me again, this time not by accident on his part but by design on my part. Just by thinking, directing him. I put my drink down on the counter and rested one hand beside it. He was washing the plastic glasses, looking for cracks, holding one up to the light, rubbing for spots. I took another sip. He had to feel my eyes on his bare shoulders, down one muscled arm, commanding it to move, come to me, closer, closer. My hand was warm, waiting. He set the glass down on the counter, the cloth near my hand. My wedding ring glinted in the light, and his hand seemed to be pulled nearer and nearer, as if our rings were magnetized. His eyes were on the floor, and then they slid up my leg, and I could feel bubbles skimming up my silky body, I could feel his blue eyes dragging up until they met mine and he held me to them, to the blue in them, to the moist blue where I could swim, deep in his blue eyes, and I could hear my own breathing … the clock … and then the timer went off like an angry wasp and Chuck jumped back as if he had been stung. His face was as red as mine and those ten minutes had just whooshed by us, quick as a hypnotic trance, unconnected to the tyranny of the clock. 🏠

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