“My turn!” Rafi squeals.
Gwen sits on the bottom bunk and begins the process again.
She longs for someone with whom she can talk this through, but there’s no one. She hasn’t even told Aimee about her past marital trouble. It’s the one thing she hasn’t told her since they became friends. All those shared drinks and laughs and late-night talks on vacations. She’s told Aimee the whole grueling story of the boys’ birth—how close she was to death, the twenty-eight-hour labor, the postpartum depression—but she’s never shared anything about Anton. Because Gwen knows that once you tell people that your husband cheated on you, they will never look at him, or you, the same way again.
She knows that from experience.
After the boys have been put to bed, Gwen walks downstairs to the foyer and calls Anton’s name. When she hears him approaching from the living room, she turns to walk the other way through the dining room toward the kitchen, so their paths won’t cross. It’s awful to be so angry that you don’t even want to face your husband. She’ll wait in the kitchen to confront him, but first he needs to read to the boys. He needs to do something useful around here.
She passes by a pair of antique pewter candlesticks, which Anton gave her for their tenth anniversary, and hesitates. Gwen finds them hideous, tall and heavy, but she keeps them out because they remind her of Anton’s promise to recommit to the marriage. In the kitchen she takes a half-empty bottle of wine out of the fridge and fills a coffee mug. Anton’s things—his laptop, a few books, notebooks, pens—lie in a haphazard pile on the kitchen counter.
He’s supposed to be writing a second book. His first, publishedyears ago when they were newlyweds and Anton had recently graduated from a well-regarded MFA program, was a massive hit. It was the rare book that managed to be both the darling of the literary world and an international bestseller. The movie rights were sold beforeThe Last Cyclamenhit the bookstores, although the adaptation seemed stuck in development. The book received fawning coverage from legacy media like NPR andThe New York Times, but was also a book club favorite.
Those first few years of marriage were shaped by Anton’s literary success. Wherever Anton went—to speak at festivals, to sign books—she tagged along as well. She felt so proud, like her long-shot bet had paid off. Anton’s success was something she could show to her parents, who had never approved of their union. She sent them every positive review, every write-up she could find. When the one millionth copy of the book sold, she made it clear to her parents that their financial support was no longer needed. Anton wasn’t just an award-winning author, he was making real money.
The book detailed one summer in the life of a young French-Lebanese woman who has a torrid affair with an older man in the sophisticated world of Beirut before the civil war. The book had an innocence and immediacy that was all the more poignant when you realized the horrific war that was about to break out in Lebanon. At the end, the heroine is forced to flee her childhood home and come to America, where she settles near Boston, leaving behind her lover and her beloved city. It was a love story and a tragedy. The writing was lyrical, the imagery evocative. Anton told everyone it was inspired by his late mother’s experience emigrating to America. She had died when he was in college, and his father had retired to France.
The problem was Anton hadn’t written a book since.
Oh, he tried. He started many projects, hoping they would turn into his second novel. But he never finished.
She’s read some of his attempts over the years—short stories,first chapters. He would be the first to admit he was floundering. The writing was flat, false. Without any real emotion or depth. He hadn’t published a thing sinceThe Last Cyclamen.
Gwen sips from her mug of wine and flips open one of the several Moleskin notebooks. It’s an act of violence to open someone else’s journal and read from it without permission. Gwen can’t deny the slight pleasure she takes in violating his privacy.
She wore her grief like a cloak, heavy on her shoulders, and like a cloak her grief hid her. Her son’s murder had done the seemingly impossible, made a middle-aged woman even less visible to the world. For what is a childless mother? A nonentity. Deep inside the pain, an ember of anger burned red-hot, calling out for vengeance.
She flips ahead in the notebook. The writing’s not terrible. A little overwrought. What does Anton know about being a middle-aged woman? Or losing a child? He grew up in the suburbs of Boston, the spoiled only child of two accountants who were determined that their son should never want the way they once had. But whatever. At least he is actually writing something. Sometimes Gwen worried that he did nothing all day long while she was at work and the boys were at school.
She flips ahead until she comes to a scene about a writer named Tony who is in New Orleans at a conference and begins to read.Tony.Could Anton be more transparent? Instead of eating dinner with his fellow conference attendees, this Tony is taking anubileyoung woman, an aspiring writer and fan of his, to one of the nicest restaurants in New Orleans. During this ostensible business dinner of oysters and champagne, the young woman seduces a powerless Tony, who, try as he might, is simply unable to stay faithful to his wife back home.
Gwen feels like she is going to throw up. And not just at the hackneyed plot. She remembers that writing conference, only it was in Tampa, not New Orleans. It was over the summer, and she later caught an expensive charge at a restaurant on their credit card bill. What was the name of that place?
When she had asked Anton about it, he exploded.
“Do you begrudge me a single nice dinner on a work trip?” he spat. “Do I have to ask your permission before I eat a meal?”
But it was more than two hundred dollars, she protested.
“It was with two other writers. They gave me cash so I could get the credit card points. Do you want their names and emails? One’s an aging lesbian poet and the other a sci-fi nerd at the same imprint as me.”
Gwen dropped it, ashamed of who she had become—a snoop, a nag, jealous, insecure. Of course he was entitled to a meal with colleagues.
Rage brews in her now. She reads a bit more—there is no aging lesbian or sci-fi nerd in these pages. It’s the story of a brilliant writer, misunderstood by his cold, heckling wife, redeemed only by the forbidden love of another woman.
The sex in the following scene is intense, the details too vivid even for Anton to have made up. His first book was nothing like this. That language was poetic, the imagery dreamlike and bittersweet. This reads like soft porn.
He traced his finger across the tattoo of a barbed wire heart centered on the left cheek of her luscious ass.
Gwen screams, a half howl, so guttural and raw she can feel it in her chest. She throws the notebook onto the floor. Then, with the sweep of her arm, she knocks everything of Anton’s off the counter.
Bastard.So hewassleeping with someone at that conference.
Thump, thump.Anton’s footsteps on the stairs are clumsy and uneven, as if he is determined to broadcast his drunkenness. Her heart galloping in her chest, Gwen rushes to gather up his notebooks and papers and put them back on the counter the way she found them. She’s not ready to confront him, not until she’s figured out what all this means. In the seconds before he enters the kitchen, she composes herself, stuffing her emotions deep downinto the darkest part of her. She’ll unpack them and examine them later when she has both time and privacy.
“I better take Sababa for a walk,” Anton says as soon as he walks into the kitchen. He steps out the back door, which leads to the side yard that abuts Scott and Aimee’s property. There’s a gate that will take him out to the street, where he can head deeper into the neighborhood or turn left toward a footpath that leads into downtown Bethesda. Gwen suspects that Anton sometimes “walks” the dog into town to go to a vape shop, or even get a drink.
Gwen follows him out onto the back patio, clutching her coffee mug of wine. “You don’t have to walk him.” Her voice quivers with suppressed rage. She wonders how Anton can not sense the fury emanating off her. “He got plenty of exercise running around with the kids tonight.”