own tongue,” Larissa said with a smile, counting out the beats before she could bound out of doors. “But otherwise you’re doing great. See you tomorrow.” My merry day isn’t long enough despite what Shakespeare says, she thought, seeking comfort in math, 5.2 miles in twelve splendid minutes.
She was a few minutes past crisp and windy March noon when she found her Jag in the drive, but Kai not in it. Did he leave already? She saw the back gate by the garage ajar and when she walked around the side of the house to the back, she found Kai chasing Riot all over her yard.
“He was barking at me,” Kai said, running up to her, panting. “I petted him, but he clearly had other things in mind. Not a very ferocious dog, is he?”
“No, she isn’t,” said Larissa. “She is a mashed potato. She would show you to the good silver if we had any.”
“Come on,” he said, even the whites of his teeth teasing her, “you must, in that house. What’s her name anyway?”
“Riot. Like you, we thought she was a boy.”
Riot was bumping Kai’s knees with her head, having brought the three-foot stick back. Kai wrested it away, threw it for her, and then chased her across the yard, yelling, “Riot! Give it! Give it back!” It was Riot’s favorite game. Pretending to fetch the stick and then being chased by a human for it. She could play it all day. How did Kai instinctively know this? Seeing him run after her dog in her back yard, like a carefree kid, filled Larissa with a troubling heaviness on this blustery day, like the new leaves were clogging up the drains of her heart.
“Hey, you want a lemonade?” Did she even have lemonade?
“How about ice water?”
She left him with Riot and went into her kitchen. As she fixed him a glass, she watched him from the window. There was such young joy in his movements.
He came in flushed and perspiring. “What am I going to do with my shirt?” he said. “I look like I’ve been rolling in it.”
He took the drink from her hands, gulped it down, chewed the ice. “We never had a dog,” he said. “We lived in an apartment; hard to keep a dog in the apartment. But I love dogs.”
“Clearly they also enjoy your company.” Riot was standing on her back paws at the door, banging on the screen with her front paws, as if to say, Get back out here, wimp.
“What a great dog.” Kai drummed on the counter, looking around Larissa’s kitchen.
She stood in her quiet house, around her clean black granite and white cabinets and watched him get his work face back. He was usually so composed; now suddenly he was panting. There was something vulnerably undeniably human about it.
“Well, the nav looks pretty good. Have you seen it?”
“No, I came straight in the back.”
“You want me to show you how to use it?”
“Sure.”
“Come,” he said. “Because I’ve got to start heading back. I have an appointment at one. What time is it?”
“Twelve thirty.”
“Yeah, I gotta run. Normally I don’t schedule anything for lunch, but this is a sure sale, the widowed sixty-year-old man wants to buy a Jag for his thirty-year-old girlfriend.”
“Isn’t that a bit of an overkill?”
Kai grinned naughtily. “How else,” he said, “is he going to get her to sleep with him?”
And in the afternoon Larissa stood in front of the mirror in the front hall, staring severely into her face, into her eyes, while the ice cream melted in the plastic bags, still in the trunk of her Jag. A small thing that might eventually be noticed by the discerning youngest members of her family, those who enjoyed eating ice cream. Mom, they might say, why does the ice cream always taste like it’s been melted and refrozen? Why are you bringing home melted ice cream? How long is the drive from King’s, Mom? Isn’t it just four minutes? Does ice cream melt this fast? What are you doing with your afternoons that you need to keep standing in front of the mirror while our precious ice cream turns to heavy cream?
One thing Larissa did not do as the ice cream pooled on her Jaguar floor was write to Che. Dear Che, help me. How do I extricate myself from this awful thing I’m falling into, a thing made geometrically more awful by the stark truth of it: I don’t even write you this so-called letter asking for instructions on self-extrication. I rationalize it away like a college grad, a slightly mocking adult who can reason. I say, how in the world is Che going to help me? She can’t even help herself with Lorenzo. That’s what I say. But the real reason I can’t write to you is because I don’t want to, and that’s worse even than sitting in the car, the knowledge of my unashamed and actualized self. I know that all I want is for one o’clock to come, to be upon me faster, so I can see his face, so I can hear his laughing, teasing voice speak to me I don’t even know of what—masonry? Luxury cars? Funerals? I don’t know. I don’t care. I barely listen. Sitting next to him is what I listen to. The leather and Dial soap and denim smell of him in my car, twenty, unmarried, childless. When I look at him, I’m not in the middle of my life but at the very beginning, one of the Great Swamp Revue traveling Jersey in search of a stage, a joke, a performance, something real amid the illusion, or is it an illusion amid all things real? The Jersey Footlight Players is what I am part of again, putting on quite a show on that stage that’s the driver seat of my Winter Gold Jag, and that’s the sordid why I haven’t written you since February. I’m afraid that in my shallow words you will hear the profound truth of what’s happening to me. I’m drawing away from you as I’m drawing nearer the black chasm that’s got him in it, slowly realizing, reluctantly admitting that he is the only thing I want.
The navigation purchase did not ease its way into Jared’s full comprehension over the next few days, and on Saturday night, when they had gathered with their friends for dinner at the house, Jared brought it up again.
Maggie immediately exclaimed, “Jared! That’s what I said to her! Explain yourself, Larissa, to your friends and your husband. It makes no sense.”
“Why do you need a nav system, Lar?” asked Ezra.
“It. Was. An. Impulse. Buy.” Larissa shot Jared a look that she hoped conveyed that if he wanted a woman tonight it would have to be one other than his wife.
“I understand,” said Ezra. “But it’s like you listening to someone else’s stage direction. It’s just so out of character.”
“Perhaps I’m playing a different character.”
She and Jared had a fight instead of sex that Saturday night. Larissa was upset with him for embarrassing her, and he said, “Embarrassing you? Well, let me ask you, how do you think I feel when Ezra says to me earlier tonight, hey man, can’t believe your wife finally agreed to direct the spring play?”
“So? You’re embarrassed by that?”
“Not by that!” he shouted. Jared never shouted. “But you never told me.”
Why did she look so surprised by this? As if she hadn’t realized she hadn’t told him. “It just happened, Jared. It wasn’t like I was keeping it from you. It happened two days ago. Three.”
“It happened on Monday, and today is Saturday—night—and this is the first conversation you and I are having about it.”
“If you can call this a conversation.”
“It’s more words than we’ve had about it for a week!”
“A