A Whole Lot of Room

Chris came back to me late at night, exhausted and on the verge of tears.  I had been editing a stack of court reports and was glad to be interrupted for anything, so I led him into my living room.  He collapsed on the couch and hunched over, head in hands.  We sat in silence for about two (maybe five) minutes, he clutching his hair convulsively and breathing heavily, I twisting my fingers together.

“She left me,” he said. I sat for a moment, waiting for the bile to rise in my throat. But it never came.

“Would you like some coffee?” I asked finally.

“I don't know.  Sure.  God knows I won't get any sleep anyway.”

“Okay, good.”  He looked up, and I smiled awkwardly and said, “I don't mean good that you won't sleep.  I mean good that you want coffee.”  I stood up to go, but he waved his hand to stop me.

“I'd prefer it if you didn't leave, actually.”

“You don't want coffee?”

“I'd rather have company.”

He hadn't changed at all in the six months since I'd seen him, which was strange considering how different I felt.  Right after he left I had gained a lot of weight.  I had managed to lose some of it again, but now I had stretch marks all around my hips and thighs.  Of course he couldn't see my stretch marks, and men never find them nearly as unattractive as we think they will, but just the embarrassing knowledge that they're there makes it almost impossible to cope.  I had also changed my hair color, from strawberry blonde to a sort of muddy brown.  Blondes tend to stand out more, and I prefer to sit in the background and observe.

“You look great,” he said.  “I mean really beautiful.”

I laughed a little, sheepishly.  “It must be the bad light.  I've been meaning to replace that light bulb.”

“It's not the light.  You have a great smile.”

“Well, thanks.”  I hesitated.  “Chris, maybe I'm just dense but I feel like something is going on here that I'm just not picking up.”

He leaned back and smiled.  It was a fake smile – we'd been married for eight years, I could tell by now – but I didn't care.  He looked like a little boy when he smiled, sort of helpless and in need of someone to take care of him.  Who could resist it?  “Can you blame a guy,” he said, sounding casual, “for wanting to come back to his wife?”

It was a horrible line, one of the worst I'd ever heard, but I couldn't exactly throw him out in the street.  He had, after all, been gone for six months, and the apartment had missed him sorely.

I woke up freezing cold the next morning; he had thrown off the covers when he got up, in such a way that half my body was exposed.  The rain was coursing, haphazard, down my window, whispering pleasantly.  Cooking noises echoed down the hall.

I didn't get dressed all the way – just a robe and my chunky wool slippers that Mom had knitted for one or another of my birthdays.  Chris was in the kitchen, frying eggs in a saucepan.

“I couldn't find a frying pan,” he said, and kissed my forehead.  I leaned up against him and put my arms around his waist and smelled.  He smelled like a man, salty and sour and warm, and a little spicy if they use aftershave.

“Do you need a change of clothes?” I asked.

“No.”

“Let me try that again.  You will need a change of clothes.  At least if you want to stay around here.”

He laughed.  “Do I stink?”

“Not yet, but I can tell you will eventually.”

“Most people do, eventually.”  He turned off the burner and buried his face in my hair, just like he used to in the very first few months of our marriage.  When we first started dating I began to spend money on fancy shampoo, just to make my hair smell good.  Of course he never bothered to smell my hair, no matter how many different scents I tried – men don't think of those things on their own.  But I got so sick of the wastefulness of buying shampoo only to have him forget to smell my hair that I finally confronted him about it, demanding that the shampoo be put to good use, and that he smell my hair as frequently as he saw me.  He insisted that he smelled my hair all the time, in bed after I was asleep, but still, as a joke, would at random moments grab me roughly and bury his face in the top of my head, which came just level with his chin.

“I was thinking of having a fried egg sandwich,” he said.  “Do you have ketchup and bread?”

“Yeah, in the fridge.  Sandwich sounds good to me too.”

“Which is why I decided to make them.”

He sounded magnanimous, and I told him so.  He said it's because he was magnanimous.

After breakfast he stretched and said he was going to work.

“Oh?”  I didn't want to look disappointed, but didn't think I could pull off happy, so took a shot at noncommittal.  “I thought you'd be sticking around for a while.”

Chris laughed.  “I am, I just don't want to lose my job.”

“Couldn't you call in sick?”

“I'll be back around five-thirty. Don't worry about it.”  He came around the table to kiss me, but I turned away.

“It's kind of...  Well, how can I not worry?  All things considered.”

“Listen.”  He chuckled and smoothed out my hair.  “I'll always come back to you.  I think I've proved that.”

“I guess you have.”  I kissed him goodbye and watched him go out the door.  I had forgotten to ask him if he was still working at the same place as before, or where he was working at all.

By the end of a week I finally believed he wanted to stay.  I began starting snippets of conversations with strangers on the bus and cashiers at the market, just to get that little kick of a thrill in my stomach when I mentioned “my husband” instead of “my ex.”  I cleared the closet – technically I hadn't acquired many new clothes, but I'd spread out what I had until it took up twice as much room as necessary – and he brought in his suitcases and unpacked them.  My clothes looked better when they had company.

And suddenly everything seemed to fall into place, just as it had been before.  We went our separate ways every morning, and came back together at night, to make love slowly and gently and then fall asleep back to back like two sides of the same coin.  And as long as I didn't question myself too closely, it was perfect.  He was perfect, once again, just as he had been in the first early days of our marriage, and it was easier to see it as a new beginning than as a repetition of the cycle.

I was coming back home from the courthouse, a month after Chris came back; I had dropped off a whole stack of edited reports only to bring an even bigger stack of them home with me.  As I pulled around the corner towards our building, I noticed a girl sitting on our front stoop.

She was petite, and looked about eighteen or nineteen.  Her hair was strawberry blonde (natural, not dyed), and her face very pale, except for two flushed spots on her cheeks, and a beautiful pink rosebud mouth.  She looked like she had been crying; she was hugging herself and rocking back and forth a little, and kept taking a folded-up piece of paper out of her pocket and looking at it.  When she saw me coming she jumped up and straightened her clothes.

“I'm sorry,” she said.  “I'm sorry, I must have the wrong address.  I didn't-- Well, actually, could you help me?”

“Which address are you looking for?”

She tossed her hair and tried very hard to look calm.  It didn't work; the corners of her mouth kept twitching.  “I need to find Chris Madison's apartment.  You wouldn't happen to know where it is?”

“This is Chris' apartment,” I said, “but he isn't home right now.  He should be back around five or so.  Would you like to come in and wait for him?”

She hesitated.  “I guess so.  If it's convenient.”

“It's fine.”  She followed me in, and I ushered her to the couch and went to start a pot of coffee.  When I came back in, bearing carafe, cream, and cups, she was looking at the paper again, bent over on the couch, head in her hand.  It was the same scene as before with Chris, and I suddenly realized who this girl was.  She seemed to notice my presence a moment late, after I had already set everything down on the table and poured for both of us.  She reached for the cup eagerly and sipped at it.

“Thanks so much,” she said.  “I didn't realize how much I was wanting coffee.”  She held her cup under her nose for a moment and inhaled, and her face relaxed into a tired smile.  “It smells divine.”  She sipped it, carefully but enthusiastically.

“So,” she said, after she had drained the top half of her cup.  “You're Chris's roommate?”

“His wife.”  I waited for a reaction, but I got none, as if each of us was waiting for the other to set the tone of the conversation.

“Oh.”  Her knuckles were white where she was gripping the sides of her mug.  She cleared her throat.  “And how long have you been married?”

“Eight years this July.”

“We've been dating for a year and a half.”  She was watching me out of the corner of her eye, though she wouldn't turn to completely face me.  “I guess you already knew that.”

“I guess I did."  

“I didn't know about you at all,” she said, using a tone I recognized from school, like a student trying to make an excuse for missing class or losing an assignment.  “I didn't even know he was married.  I work at the coffee place where he used to stop every morning on his way to the office.  You probably don't even want to hear any of this.”

“No, I want to know everything about it.”

She cocked her head to one side, and for a split second I thought she would start to cry.  But she was too young and pretty to let herself cry in front of me, and the veil went back up behind her hard brown eyes.  “So we've been going out kind of since I started college.  And it was, you know, not really that serious.  Like all we wanted to do was have fun, you know?  And we were having a lot of fun.  I moved out of my parents' house and I had my own apartment, and he never really slept over with me, even though he wanted to, he said.  But he said he had roommates who would worry if he didn't come home.  It was weird at the time, but I didn't really think about it, you know?  And then he moved in, which was also weird at the time, but it seemed like what people do.  And it was really, really wonderful to come home to him every night.”

Her head dropped to her hands, and she heaved slow, racking sobs that sounded too big for her body.

“You must have loved him very much,” I said at last.  I couldn't think of anything else that seemed appropriate.

“Yeah.”  She sat up and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.  “I loved him a lot.  But not anymore.”  She stood abruptly.  “I should leave.  You looked busy when you got home, getting everything ready for him.  You should know – I used to do that every night too.  Just...  Look, just tell Chris that the pregnancy test was wrong.  It was a false positive.  And that I hope he has a nice life.  And that he's a bastard.”  She choked on the last word, and strode out the door, still rubbing at her eyes with her sleeve.

“Wait,” I said, and jumped up after her.  “Let me at least – I'll walk you to the door.”  I took a glance at the clock over the kitchen door as we passed.  It was almost seven.  I handed her the sweater she had shed by the front door and forced a smile.

“I wonder if I could ask you something.”

“Yeah, whatever.”  All the veneer was gone now – she was a disinterested college co-ed who had just gone through a bad breakup.  “Whatever it is that happened, I guess you have a right to know.”

“When did you know he was leaving?”

She bit her lip and looked out the window at the falling night.  “He wasn't coming home on time anymore.  He used to get home from work right away, and I would be there waiting for him.  But it was like he lost interest for the last couple months.  And then I thought I was pregnant.”

“Thank you,” I said.  “I know it's hard to talk about it.”

“It's not so hard.  I've been thinking about it a lot.  Honestly, I thought I was going to come here and ask him to come home.  I realized once I got here that it wasn't what I really wanted.”  She nodded at me, as if she had communicated something of huge importance, and left.

I almost chased after her to congratulate her on realizing that she didn't really want him.  I almost followed her, honestly – I almost hoped she was pregnant, that something good had come out of everything.  But it was enough that she was able to leave, and I stood there for a long time, watching her disappear down the street, appreciating the fact that it was seven o'clock and Chris wasn't home yet.  It was the best thing that had ever happened, and I decided to take advantage of my excuse.  When it was so dark I couldn't see her walking anymore, in that last moment before the streetlights came on, I shut the door behind me and went to the closet to find my suitcase.