Gray was just back from two weeks at the Tokyo office, still in his trench coat, smelling of airplanes and winter. He had brought the mail in and offered it to Allison with a kiss, like a bouquet. Catalogues, year-end financial statements, offers for credit cards, she laughed and accepted them, the gifts of their ordinary life together. She could never quite relax when her husband was away.
He was standing right beside her when she opened the letter.
"Honey," she said, staring down at the paper in her hand, "have you ever heard of a place called 'Illusion Enterprises'? They claim we owe them forty-three dollars and eighty-nine cents. For a phone call."
"Hmm?" Gray glanced up from the broker's summary. His eyes were slightly red, unfocused. He didn't sleep well on planes.
Allison often had to repeat her questions to him—he had so much on his mind—and so she did just that. Gray studied the bill for a moment, frowned, then shook his head. There was absolutely nothing unusual about his expression or his manner. Allison remembered that later.
At the time she put the piece of paper in her to-do pile without thinking much about it. It was probably a computer mistake, an annoyance, something that could be handled the next day. It was Gray's face that drew her attention now. After almost thirteen years together, it still gave her such pleasure to look at him, her handsome husband.
She was suddenly overcome by a desire to pull off that coat with its vaguely foreign odor and wrap her arms around him, claiming him back for herself and the children. But she hesitated. Justin and Priscilla would be at school for another few hours, but she was tired from taking care of the children by herself for two weeks. When they were both tired, lovemaking could be a bit of a chore. So she just smiled at him and said, "I'm glad you're home."
"I am, too."
His lips on her forehead were cool, a little dry.
~
The next morning, after dropping the children off at school, Allison headed to the study where she had filed away the mail. This time she examined the bill more carefully. The thin paper crackled between her fingers and the faded gray lettering suggested a printer cartridge running low on ink. It did seem odd that a single call would be billed separately from their regular bill, but the information was stated clearly enough. An eleven-minute call had been made from the line in the study to a 900 number on December 16 at 7:37 pm. The amount due: $43.89, payable upon receipt.
December 16. A Saturday, the day of their cousin Lucy's wedding. Allison remembered filling in the blank square in her American Impressionists engagement calendar next to a melancholy painting of a city square veiled in snow. Both of her sisters were in town for the occasion. Catherine and her husband Pieter flew in from San Francisco, and Stevie took the train down from New Haven with her new boyfriend. Afterwards they all came back to the house for a family reunion of their own.
7:37 pm. That must have been some time between the black bean chili and the Christmas cookies. It was a scene not so different from the one she had allowed herself to imagine as she was getting everything ready for the weekend: the whole family gathered in the living room, the children spilling over onto the floor amidst heaps of red and silver wrapping paper torn from the early Christmas presents Catherine brought. And, of course, everyone was smiling.
In fact, she was still surprised how well it had gone. When Daddy made a holiday toast to "my three lovely daughters," he even smiled at Catherine—her pregnancy seemed to have mellowed them both. Stevie, who'd gotten so moody this past year, was actually pleasant to Gray. Justin and Priscilla had only one brief exchange of creative name-calling. Everyone complimented her on the new house, and they seemed sincere.
No one mentioned anything about needing to make a phone call.
~
Now she had a call to make, to the 800 number for billing questions listed at the end of the letter. The woman who answered the phone had a low, unhurried voice, a voice that remained pleasant even after Allison described the problem. The service handled billing for so many numbers, the woman explained, she had no idea if that particular one was a psychic line, a horoscope line or one of the lines for adults only. December and January were particularly busy for the psychic and horoscope lines, she added brightly, then suggested Allison call the 900 number to be sure. The first fifteen seconds were free.
As the phone rang, Allison watched the second hand on her wristwatch jerk forward, then pause, jerk forward, then pause, wondering if fifteen seconds would be enough to learn what she needed to know. It was. She heard a click on the other end of the line, then was connected to a female voice, soothing and sweet, describing in detail her appreciation of the taste of a certain male body fluid. "Hot, creamy love spunk," she called it.
Allison's reaction was immediate and physical. Her hand shot out and pressed down the switchhook. For a few moments the only sound in the room was her own agitated breathing.
She dialed the 800 number again. The same cool voice came through the receiver, "Illusion Enterprises. Customer Service."
"It's a sex line."
Allison had forgotten to identify herself, but the woman seemed to recognize her voice. "Oh. I see," she replied. Beneath the composure, Allison sensed genuine concern, even sympathy.
"I can assure you no one made a call like that from this house."
"Ah, well." The woman paused. Delicately. "We do have a few seconds of the caller's voice recorded in our files. It helps us screen out minors. If you give me your customer number again, I'll bring it up on the computer."
Allison listened, fingers tight on the receiver. It wasn't Justin. That much was a relief. An eleven-year-old couldn't sound like that, even if he were that sort of boy. No, it was a grown man who, instead of following the instructions to "please leave your name and account number after the tone" merely repeated those same words back. The man's foreign accent, sounding rather like a Nazi villain, was obviously faked. The edge of laughter in his voice was not.
Patient, polite, the woman replayed the recording for her half a dozen times.
~
Afterwards, Allison sat at the desk staring at the phone. December 16 at 7:37 pm. In her memory the men were all there, Daddy sipping his eggnog, Gray helping Priscilla put her new toy stable together, Pieter passing around a tin of spice cookies his mother had sent from Holland, Stevie's boyfriend—Ethan, that was his name—joking about the best man's speech. And yet she must have a blind spot, or the opposite of one, seeing someone who wasn't there, who was in this room instead making that phone call. She felt a dull ache in her chest, like a bruise from an injury that had gone unnoticed. What hurt more than the call itself was the thought that someone would so casually, even gleefully, insult her hospitality. Who among those smiling faces in her memory could do such a thing?
Gray, of course, was out of the question.
There was Ethan. He was a graduate student in history, and he looked the part, slender, bespectacled, thick brown hair curling at odd angles from his head. He had the aloofness of a scholar, though Gray called it "attitude." But he had always been charming to her. In fact, after the wedding they had a nice conversation in this very room about her great-great-grandfather's book collection. Somehow she ended up telling him something she hadn't even mentioned to Gray, that she was thinking of going back to school to get a master's in historical preservation.
"That's a wonderful idea." Ethan didn't look at all homely when he smiled, the glow in his amber eyes like the sun behind stained glass, a warmth that made her feel suddenly, surprisingly—interesting. Then he asked, still smiling, "Do you have any particular program in mind?"
She had to admit, blushing, that she hadn't gotten that far in her plans. It was, for the moment, just her little fantasy.
~
No, it wasn't Ethan because, the more she thought about it, the more she was certain she recognized a husky quality in the voice that could only belong to Catherine's husband.
What made it worse was that she liked Pieter. She and Gray agreed it was a rare man who could put up with Catherine, and so cheerfully, too. Yet, there had always been something about him that was a little off. She had never quite gotten used to the way he held her gaze a few extra moments when he spoke to her, his eyes too frank and probing for a brother-in-law.
And now, another memory of that weekend came back to her—Catherine's face, eyes lowered, fixed on her own rounded belly. Allison had seen in her abstracted, inward gaze the tranquillity of a Raphael Madonna, but perhaps instead her sister had been enduring some private pain.
The morning after the wedding Allison was putting on her makeup when Catherine wandered into the master bathroom. Allison braced herself for one of her sister's barbed compliments about the house that would suggest her own good fortune was both unexciting and undeserved. But Catherine was in a gentle mood. She reminisced about their mother in a very touching way, without using the word "doormat" once. She had questions, too, about the pregnancy: Did Allison's hips start getting wobbly at the end? Could she really just breath her way through labor pains like those books claimed?
Then she asked quietly if having kids had changed their sex life.
Allison couldn't resist teasing her. However cool and knowing she had tried to be as a teenager, her younger sister managed to be cooler and know more. So she put on her coolest smile and said, "I'm not telling."
Besides, she didn't think she could even begin to explain how parenthood had changed her entire being, the way her body experienced simple sensations: softness, the weight of a small body in her arms. How little things—the way Justin pursed his lips so solemnly when he was engrossed in a computer game, Priscilla's throaty giggle when she and Gray played "upside-down girl"—touched a sensitive crescent of flesh in the very center of her body that nothing else had touched before. It would be, she thought, like trying to describe sex to a virgin.
Now, it was clear, she should have told Catherine what she did know, that their sex life was different, but like all things rare and precious, it was better. In their first years together, Gray was never tired, always slipping up behind her and taking her in his arms. "My perfect wife," he would whisper, and she'd laugh, half wanting to believe it. And yet the kiss that followed aroused in her two distinct sensations, a double blossom of desire and dread that because of her body's slowness to respond, their lovemaking would not be what it should.
But that had changed. There were times now, when she had talked herself breathless, she would lean over to her husband, kiss him on his warm shoulder and linger there, pressing her breasts into his back, tracing his upper arm with her fingertip. Then she would wait in the darkness for him to turn his head to her, lips parted in reflex like an infant. And it was then, when his hands were sleepy-slow and her flesh flushed and awake that she knew a foretaste of certain pleasure, like she knew when a summer peach was heavy in her hand, and the skin peeled right off in her fingers, and the fragrance of the juice alone made her tongue prickle, that the fruit would be sweet, effortlessly sweet.
She couldn't tell these things to Catherine then, but she had something to tell her now.
Allison glanced down at the bill again. She was tempted, for a moment, to do the easy thing, to say nothing and write the check.
But she knew it would not be so easy to put this unpleasant business behind her. How could she forget her sister's mournful eyes or that strange, laughing voice which seemed to grow more desperate with each repetition of that recording? Perhaps Pieter meant it as some kind of joke, but Allison heard it as a call for help. This time she could not ignore it.
Still, it took her another three hours to get up the nerve to call her sister.
~~~
Catherine was having a pretty good day. After her OB check up, she took a stroll over to the botanical gardens and picked up some spring rolls for lunch on the way home. That left her with the whole afternoon to nap or read or indulge in some nesting behavior like tacking up that ugly black-and-white-and-red clown poster the woman at the baby superstore had talked her into buying. All in all, she was glad she'd decided to take a month off before the baby was born.
Then Allison called and told her she thought Pieter was going insane from sex deprivation.
That's what she meant, anyway, beneath the carefully worded questions about recent changes in his mood or behavior, that tactful comment about how "the stresses of fatherhood sometimes begin before the baby comes."
Yet, as she dialed Pieter's work number, Catherine had to smile. It was sweet of her sister to come up with an excuse for his alleged misdeed, but given the choice, she would much rather have a sane husband who indulged in a little phone sex at the in-law's.
The phone rang three times. That meant Pieter was not in his office. She left a message on his voice mail to call her when he got the chance.
Then Catherine found herself with time to think.
She wasn't upset. She was pacing the living room because the baby was kicking so hard the cloth of her shirt jumped, and she took that as a hint to get some exercise. She wondered if her daughter—the ultrasound had suggested a "she"—found the womb a blissful place. Sometimes Catherine suspected she was bored in there.
With nothing better to do herself, she called the 800 number her sister had given her so she could listen to the evidence. The guilty party was putting on a foreign accent, but it didn't sound at all like Pieter. Not that he wasn't a good mimic. He could do a hilarious imitation of his relatives from the north of Holland, though his real specialty was dialects like Belgian French. This accent, though, was clumsy, Hogan's Heroes German with a touch of Maurice Chevalier. The third time through, she thought she detected a hint of Ethan.
He was a strong possibility. At the wedding last month, one of those tepidly tasteful country club affairs, Ethan had entertained her and Pieter with impersonations of certain well-known politicians, even drawing a few sour looks from the groom's uncles at the next table.
Or it could have been Gray. It was not like him to be so careless, but then again Catherine knew how family gatherings affected him.
~
It would be twelve years ago in June, a year before their mother died, that her parents gave their last barbecue in honor of their own wedding anniversary. Most of the relatives still managed to make it to the event, although it must have been clear to all that her parents' marriage was more a cautionary tale than a cause for celebration. Indeed, everyone made more of a fuss over Allison, gliding around the party in a maternity dress of lavender-blue silk. Her older sister was the only woman Catherine knew who could make advanced pregnancy look elegant.
By the time they'd cleared away the white cake and ice cream, Catherine decided she couldn't bear one more smirking question about her plans now that she'd dropped out of Brown. So she escaped, heading across the creek that ran through the far end of the property to the poolhouse where she used to go with boys from the public high school she didn't want her parents to meet.
It only took a few hits on the half-smoked joint she had in her pocket to restore her mood. Alone, calmed by the drone of the pool filter, it didn't matter that her boyfriend had just told her he needed more from a relationship than good sex or that her own father was refusing to give her a cent if she transferred to a college that didn't give grades.
She didn't see Gray coming, but suddenly he was there, too, standing at the other end of the chain link enclosure, gazing back at the party, an island of pale gold in the summer dusk. It struck her how much he looked like Allison. A matched pair of end tables. So smooth and cool, she imagined if she broke him open she would see whorls of blond wood inside, too.
He moved closer. "It looks different from here, doesn't it?" he said, as if to himself.
"What does?" She smiled at his profile. "Marriage?"
Gray turned his head toward her, slowly, and returned the smile. "It might happen to you some day."
"I can't even imagine it," she replied. "And I know I don't want kids."
"That happened sooner than we'd planned." He looked back across the lawn. "But we're happy about it."
Then he started to talk, ramble really, wherever the gin-and-tonics took him: how it wasn't so bad to settle down, how he'd gotten two wonderful younger sisters in the bargain. "You know, Catherine, I don't want to overstep my bounds here, but I hope you do think of me as your brother. I know your dad's been giving you a hard time, and if there's anything I can do, if you need a loan for school. . . ."
"Thanks. Thank you," she said and she meant it, too. She was suddenly so overcome with gratitude that someone—anyone—was looking out for her, she was afraid she might even start to cry.
And so it was she who slipped her arms around him in a sisterly embrace. He was warm. That wasn't what she was expecting, a warm end table, nor was she expecting him to kiss her like that. On the lips, then his tongue in her mouth, one hand sliding down over her ass, fingers sinking into the flesh. He had the urgency of a man expecting resistance, but she wasn't resisting. She was kissing him back and wondering if he hadn't gotten any in a long time or if he always liked it rough.
Catherine knew she was betraying her sister, but the funny thing was, she never felt closer to Allison—to being her—than when she was kissing her husband. Only when he began tugging at the zipper of her jeans, when it wasn't just a game anymore, did she finally pull away.
She and Gray never talked about it. She left him by the pool, staring at her wide-eyed, his lips pressed together as if he were punishing them. The married ones always looked that way.
But Pieter was different. He was so comfortable about sex. Just last week he told her how he liked to feel the baby moving between them when they made love. "Do you think she knows?" Catherine asked, dismayed to discover within herself a hidden reserve of conventionality. "Of course, she knows," he replied, running his palm over the slope of her belly. "She knows your pleasure."
But what if he did make that call? He still surprised her now and then, although she could never decide whether it was due to his Dutch equanimity or the intrinsic foreignness of all men. What if she no longer surprised him, if, in spite of every effort, she had become a "wife," the very word pregnant with tedium and encumbrance? They still made love at least twice a week, sometimes more, and that wasn't going to change after the baby was born, no matter what those parenting books said. But what if he had other desires he could only satisfy by creeping into Allison's study, putting on that ridiculous accent, pulling a box of Kleenex nearer?
The phone rang.
Pieter laughed for a long time when she told him.
"No, I didn't do it. And I feel just fine."
"I'm really glad to hear it."
"Of course, they say a madman doesn't know he's crazy."
"Well, speaking of crazy, Her Serene Highness had a few hairs out of place over this one."
"Really? Why? Was it S&M or something?"
"She didn't go into detail. Didn't want to traumatize a pregnant woman, I guess. I think she was afraid this would end our marriage."
"Would it?" She could tell Pieter was still smiling.
"No, of course not." She paused. "Would you make a phone call like that?"
"Well, I see those ads in the paper sometimes and wonder what it would be like."
"I've wondered myself. You know, we could do it together some time. A little ménage à trois?" She had meant it as a joke, but the words came out too earnest, almost pleading.
"Now, Catherine, are you sure you didn't make that call?" " Pieter said and laughed again.
~
Of course, Pieter knew about her secret life. She told him things, in bed, on long drives. Usually he was amused, occasionally his eyes would darken with concern—you're lucky you didn't get hurt—and once, after listening quietly, he said, "It must have been lonely."
He was right, of course, but it was exciting, too, to be different from her sisters. She could never have Allison's self-possessed beauty that moved every man she ever dated to propose or Stevie's knack for collecting certificates of excellence Daddy kept in a special drawer in his big oak desk. Catherine's talents were less public, but she was told she was very good at what she did. Very good, indeed.
Yet, until she met Pieter, she always chose lovers who reminded her of her family, well-mannered men in well-made clothes with an eye on the future. She enjoyed watching the reserve, the propriety melt into a fine sweat that gathered in that little hollow at the base of the neck, their voices rising with excitement, disbelief, as they asked her, will you do this? Will you do this for me? And how about this? She would answer yes. Yes. And yes. There was nothing they could think up, with their limited imaginations, that she wouldn't do.
Except stay past dawn. She got to be good at that, too, the early morning get-away. Groping for her clothes, moving carefully through an unfamiliar room, taking one last glance at their faces, circumspect and solemn again in sleep. It was the only time she felt something close to tenderness for them.
That first night with Pieter, she woke to find the bed beside her flat and cool. She was unsettled, having nothing to escape from, but she still rose. He intercepted her in the hall outside the kitchen, already dressed, his skin gray, his deep-set eyes black in the pale light.
"Won't you have a coffee before you go?" he said.
An offer so simple and artless, she had stayed.
When he mentioned marriage several months later, she had to say "yes." It was the most outrageous thing any man had ever asked her to do.
~~~
Stevie placed the receiver gently in its cradle and lay back on the futon. She was proud of herself for handling it so well. She hadn't laughed out loud, though she'd wanted to, when Allison suggested with a strained attempt at humor that Ethan may have made that dirty phone call as part of a research project. She hadn't blurted out in turn, though she'd wanted to, that Allison might ask her own husband if he'd made any calls that evening. After all, what else could you expect from a man who took advantage of a car ride in the darkness to feel up his sister-in-law?
She pressed her lips together in a half-smile. Allison was safe in that new house of hers, with its skylights and exposed beams and baskets of cinnamon-scented soap in the powder room. She would never tell her—or anyone—about what happened with Gray. She wasn't so proud of the way she'd handled that one.
Stevie knew how to keep family secrets. She had always been the one who knew things. She knew how Daddy invested his money; he explained it all to her one Saturday when she was fourteen and expressed an interest in the stock market. She knew that Allison reminded him most of their mother and that this was not exactly a compliment. She knew he was still trying to figure out what he'd done to deserve Catherine's antics and, though he never said it in so many words, that her own belated arrival had disappointed his last great hope for a son.
Her gaze wandered past the cluttered desk to the kitchen alcove of the studio apartment she and Ethan shared. The only window faced east, so dusk came early here, but in lamplight the place looked almost romantic. Her eyes settled on the pair of slender, translucent mushrooms growing from a damp patch in the plaster above the stove. When they grew big enough, Ethan said, he was going to make a special mushroom stew and invite his advisor for dinner.
Ethan liked to joke. The few times she'd taken him up to Allison's, he never missed a chance to slip in remarks about Marxism's enduring value as a tool of historical analysis or the function of sexual repression as a cornerstone of consumer capitalism. He claimed he did it just to see Gray do that funny thing with his mouth. It was possible Ethan had made that call in the interest of further research on the facial expressions of the suburban WASP male.
Stevie glanced back at the phone. Ethan's office hours sometimes went late on Thursdays, but if he'd already left, she'd have to deal with his office mate's clumsy attempts at flirtation. Kirk was always trying to talk her into signing up for one of his classes, apparently under the delusion that if he had been last spring's grader for "American Cultural History since 1876," she'd be sleeping with him instead.
What Ethan's friends didn't seem to understand was that he gave her that A-plus on her final paper before he even knew who she was. When she stopped by his office, as he suggested in his note, to discuss submitting the paper for the history department's undergraduate prize, it was hardly love at first sight. His brown curls were so disheveled she had to fight the urge to offer him a comb.
It was the words that finally got to her: this is the first A-plus I've ever given, I don't imagine you're crazy enough to consider graduate work in history? Stevie was not unused to praise from her teachers, but as he talked on, his deep voice curled up inside of her, its warmth rising slowly from her belly to her cheeks. And she wondered then—and now—how it was a stranger could touch her in exactly the way she liked to be touched.
~
When she asked him, Ethan gasped and slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. "How rude of me! I completely forgot to leave Allison a check for that phone call."
"Well, I knew you didn't do it," Stevie replied, as she helped unpack the vegetables he bought for the curry. "I'm guessing it was Gray."
"Gray?" Ethan frowned. "Well, if Gray did do it, I'd have to change my opinion of him. It would mean he has an imagination after all."
"Everybody has that kind of imagination. What it means is he's not getting what he needs from good old Allison."
"She's the one who's not getting what she needs," Ethan said, his voice suddenly soft.
Stevie ignored the comment. "Well, I think it's creepy. It's like he's cheating on her, don't you think?"
"Not really. That kind of thing is just an extension of a fantasy."
It was not the answer she had been expecting.
"But what about the woman on the other end of the line?"
He shrugged and started to wash the carrots.
Stevie was beginning to feel light-headed. "So, let me get this straight. You wouldn't mind at all if I talked dirty to another man on the telephone?"
"No, not especially. It's just a mind game. It wouldn't count as infidelity."
"Well, I think it does count, because for me the most important sex organ is the mind."
Ethan turned all the way around to look at her. "Alas, I wish I could say the same." Then he laughed. She liked his laugh when they were laughing together.
"Okay, fine, so how about if I let somebody fondle my thigh? If it was just an extension of a fantasy?"
Ethan considered the question for a moment, eyes narrowed. "I guess I do draw the line there. I know it's unevolved of me, but I don't like the idea of another man touching you. But phone sex, an internet encounter, all of that's fine as long as it doesn't lead to any real personal involvement."
"But I would argue there's even personal involvement with a picture in a magazine. Behind the stupid poses and tacky lingerie is a real woman with thoughts and feelings."
"Wait a minute, Stef. If you follow that to its logical conclusion then wondering what some attractive woman looks like naked constitutes personal involvement and thus infidelity." He began to chop the carrots, bringing the knife down on the cutting board as if to punctuate his words. "That's ridiculous. It sounds like thought control to me." He turned to her again with that unrelenting smile. "I had no idea you were concealing fascist sympathies."
She was completely disarmed when he started talking like that, twisting things just his way. There was no choice then but to retreat—strategically—to the futon and lounge back, eyes closed, right arm tucked behind her head, left knee raised. The very image of Woman in Ecstasy.
Maybe she would try a little thought control. With the power of her mind alone, she would make her boyfriend put down those carrots, walk over to the futon, fall to his knees beside her. She would make him lean close and whisper, "You're not really mad, are you? Stef? Hey, Sleeping Beauty." Then, because she willed it, he would touch his lips to hers, moving slowly to her throat, her breasts, wetting her shirt with his kisses.
Not that it would be much of a trick. Their arguments always ended that way.
The truth was, she did want his imagination all to herself and the only time she had it was before they even met.
"I pictured you as rather plain, a little heavy in the hips, but with beautiful sad brown eyes," he told her. It was their second time in bed. "Then in walks this blonde babe with a perky little blue-jeaned butt. I was so disappointed."
Ethan grinned, but she felt that pang of jealousy anyway, of a self whose beauty existed in words on a page, in the graceful arc of a well-crafted argument, and not in the more tangible endowment he was admiring now with slow, circling fingertips.
It was the same that night in the car with Gray. He had some excuse why he had come to pick her up at the train station—Daddy needed new glasses for night driving or something. So she found herself sitting beside him, watching bands of light then shadow slip diagonally over his right cheek as they drove under the streetlights of the downtown. She could still see why she'd had such a crush on him as a child, although her taste in men was less conventional now. He was telling her how he really wanted to read that A-plus paper. They were all so impressed. And for that moment she was buoyant, what Daddy called a "special girl," which meant not being a girl at all, but pure intellect floating in space.
He knew she was going places, Gray was saying, as his right hand slipped from the steering wheel and reached over, fingers curving around her thigh. A light squeeze, then a pat, and then he rested his hand there, warm through her jeans, for almost as long as she could hold her breath. Outside the car, the storefronts gave way to houses, rectangles of window glowing through the trees, but inside, Stevie sat perfectly still, going nowhere at all.
Then it happened—the thing she didn't like to remember—an answering jolt of warmth between her legs as if he'd touched her there, too. She knew she should have protested, knocked his hand away, told him straight out he had no right to touch her that way. But she didn't. She couldn't, because it was really her own body reaching out and pulling her back down into that woman's flesh with its curves and hollows that had grown up around her.
~~~
It was past eleven. Gray's flight from Dallas must have been delayed. Allison pulled the afghan over her feet and settled into a corner of the sofa. The new living room was always so cold, although the architect assured her the wall of glass would provide a stunning view of the garden in spring. All she saw now against the expanse of black was her own hazy reflection, stifling a yawn. But Allison was in no danger of falling asleep. She had something to ask her husband.
For a moment she considered getting up to check with the airline, but the very thought made her faintly queasy. In the past few days, she hadn't been able to pick up the phone to schedule a dentist appointment without seeing him: a man, his features blurred, wrapping thick fingers around the receiver, pressing it close to his ear.
When Gray called last night to let her know the meetings were going well and he expected to be home late the following evening, she almost unburdened herself in the usual way. He always knew the right thing to say to calm her worries. He would reassure her it was ridiculous to suspect, even for a moment, that her sixty-five year old father had gone to this extreme to ease his widower's solitude.
But then she found herself listening very carefully to the sound of his voice. He was telling her about the waitress in the hotel coffee shop with a platinum blonde hairdo half again as high as she was. "They sure do mean it when they say everything is bigger down here," he said, and he didn't have to laugh, the words themselves seemed to drawl and lilt into a mildly contemptuous smile. That's when she remembered Gray had never actually denied making that call.
Suddenly that dull ache in her chest was gone. Because it had pained her to think of Catherine, always more fragile than she let on, having to cope with a troubled husband and a new baby. Or proud little Stevie, so clearly in love, but with a man who would embarrass her and her family for his own amusement.
But her own husband? The idea filled her with a strange calm. Gray often said that he worked hard so they could pay people to do the things they didn't want to do: the housecleaner, the gardening service, the after-school baby-sitter on Mondays and Thursdays. Why not hire a female voice to insist with such conviction that semen tasted exactly like cream? Allison would be hard pressed to do it herself.
No, she wouldn't really mind if her husband engaged in a bit of improbable fantasy now and then. She had a few of her own. Sometimes, even as he lay sleeping beside her, she would touch herself and imagine a lover, or part of one, for although he had hands of infinite patience and skill, he never had a face. What real man would bring her such soaring pleasure and demand nothing in return?
But she would never want Gray to find out. They had a good marriage. Over the years she learned this meant one simple thing: They were kind to each other.
That was the part that didn't make sense. Gray said he liked her sisters. And if for some reason of his own he needed private time in the middle of her family reunion, he would be discreet. He preferred his cell phone anyway, and that bill was sent straight to his office. If Allison knew anything about him, it was that he was too smart to get caught. Unless he wanted to be.
~
"You didn't have to wait up, honey," Gray said, but she could tell by his lingering kiss that he was glad she did.
Allison tried her best to respond, but the words slipped out, "There's something we have to talk about."
"Oh? What did I do now?" He drew back, eyebrows raised in exaggerated alarm. Usually she laughed, but this time she could only manage a wan smile.
And so he was suitably grave when he followed her into the study. She sat down at the desk, the bill before her. "It's this phone call. Pieter and Ethan both say they didn't do it. I doubt that Daddy even knows what phone sex is. So I called back that operator, the one I thought was so nice, and do you know what she said to me?"
Gray stepped up behind her. "What did she say?"
"'Somebody's lying to you.'"
Allison waited, staring straight ahead. Flustered by the silence, she began the little speech she'd prepared.
"Of course, I can understand that after thirteen years you might be looking for a little variety, and this is one way to do that. But if it's more, if it's a problem with us. . . ."
"Wait a minute, honey. Stop right there. You're not saying you think I did it, are you? Don't you know me better than that?" Gray gave a quick snort of a laugh and leaned back against the desk beside her. "Besides, I like to see what I'm getting."
She was about to laugh, too, with relief and embarrassment, but something in his eyes, something real beneath the joke, made her look away.
"Have you been worrying about this the whole time I've been gone?" His voice was softer.
She nodded without meeting his eyes.
"Can I take a look at this?" He eased the bill out from under her hand. She allowed herself a glance at his face as he studied the paper. She recognized that expression, brow furrowed, lips tight, the right corner of his mouth curving into a half smile. He was trying to control his anger. Or seeing something for the first time.
"This is very odd. Don't these 900 services usually bill directly through the phone company?" he said, turning the paper briefly to check the back, which was blank. "You know, I have an idea what's going on here. This is some kind of scam. They target certain zip codes, send out a bunch of these things around holiday party time, and bank on the fact that people are too embarrassed to ask their guests about it."
Allison started as if she'd been shaken. "But she played me a tape of the caller's voice," she murmured.
"You said the caller didn't give a name or number, right? They probably recycle the same thing over and over. Any of the guys over in sales can tell you the customer hears what he wants to hear. If you set it up right, he won't even notice he's paying your price."
"I never even thought of that." Allison brought her hands to her cheeks. She was blushing. "I feel like such a fool."
"No. No, honey." He rested his hand on her shoulder and smiled down at her. "You're my perfect wife."
She had to smile then, at those familiar words, their little joke. It was almost magic how he could gather up the darkness in her—the stinging memory of those calls to her sisters, the flicker of anger that he hadn't paid more attention the first time she showed him the bill—and with a simple gesture, sweep it away to a world outside where all kinds of things happened she couldn't understand or explain. All she had to do was believe him.
She took a long, slow breath, tasting the familiar air, with the faintly weary pleasure of a traveler home from a long journey.
"I'll take care of this tomorrow," Gray said. He glanced at the bill again, then smiled and shook his head. "Well, she is right about one thing. Somebody is lying."
Copyright © 2001 AZX LLC
