Happiness Sold Separately Read online

  He was on his knees, ass in the air, up to his elbow in dust and grime under the giant refrigerator, when a man’s voice said, “Can I help you?” White Nikes, blue scrubs. A bearded face hovering above.

  “My specimen cup rolled under there.” Ted could hear the panic in his voice.

  The guy kneeled, peered under the refrigerator. “Man,” he said.

  They couldn’t reach the cup or budge the refrigerator. The guy—a nurse, his badge said—could call someone from facilities to move the machine, but for some reason that would take more than the allotted forty-five minutes for delivery of the specimen. Ted had to return to the nurse’s station. Back to the key, back to The Room. He wasn’t sure if it would all work out again. It did, but he had to believe that the second sample wasn’t as good as the first, even though Dr. Weston assured him it would be fine.

  But it wasn’t fine, or something wasn’t fine, because the in vitro didn’t work.

  “Let’s adopt,” Elinor said after the negative pregnancy test. When they got the news, Elinor canceled her meetings at work, drove home, and curled up in a ball on the sofa for twenty-four hours. But soon she was back on the Web, doing research and enthusiastically laying out Plan B for meeting with an adoption agency. Meanwhile Ted feared the process would be too hard on them. Close friends of theirs had had their newly adopted baby taken back by a fickle birth mother. Another couple’s foreign adoption fell through at the last minute, after they’d already traveled to Russia. “It’s not like a trip to Sears, where you show up and plunk down the Visa,” Ted argued. Ted wasn’t sure he was up for this kind of letdown. Besides, a foreign adoption might involve medical problems that could break their hearts. “Can’t we just take a break for now?” he asked, embarrassed by the simple fact that he wasn’t as strong as Elinor when it came to this stuff. What if they did another cycle and it worked, but Elinor miscarried a second time? He couldn’t bear to go through that again.

  Elinor insisted there was no time for a break, so they tried another cycle of in vitro, even though the odds were low. Ted felt the impossibly narrow slice on Dr. Weston’s statistical pie chart closing in on them. It seemed best to quit. But saying that made him unsupportive.

  Finally, Ted merges onto Highway 280, shifting up to fifth gear. Air rushes across the open sunroof. He looks up at the hills above the freeway, which are still bone-dry from the summer heat.

  After they quit going to the doctor, Ted was sure they’d get their lives back. Take hikes, travel. Instead of regaining a zest for life, though, Elinor seemed to quit life. She retreated into the laundry room. Disdain crept into her voice.

  “I don’t care,” she’d reply when Ted asked if she’d like to go for a walk or if he could fix her dinner or rent a movie. I’m going through this, too! he wanted to shout. Instead he, too, receded. Out for long walks, down to the gym, and eventually under Gina’s old sleeping bag.

  He had signed up for a diet and exercise training program at the gym during the treatments. He figured it might even help his sperm count, which varied from month to month. (“Hmm, quite viscous,” the Gen-X doctor had said, frowning at the report from the lab on his clipboard. The next cycle he said, “Unusually low motility this time around.” You jack off into a cup! Ted wanted to say.) Eventually everything seemed futile except for those trips to the gym. The more Ted went, the better he felt. It was purely Pavlovian. At some point, he realizes now, he did start looking forward to seeing Gina. Not really in a romantic or sexual way. Just to get a hit of her optimism.

  “You’re doing great, Dr. Mackey,” she’d say, smiling over her clipboard, light brown bangs falling into her eyes. “You’ve made the most progress of all my clients. You should do a triathlon! I can help you train on the bike and in the pool.” Ted was touched by her confidence in him.

  Still, the initial seduction took him by surprise. It happened during a fitness test ten weeks into his exercise program. He and Gina were in an upstairs office in the club. Gina took Ted’s blood pressure, checked his resting pulse. She chattered on about baseball, talked about the players as though they were movie stars. She was a Red Sox fan, and she was certain her team would make it to the play-offs this year. Ted ran on the treadmill, then Gina took his pulse again.

  “Perfect, Dr. Mackey,” she said. For the hundredth time, he insisted she call him Ted. But Gina seemed enthralled by Ted’s profession.

  “I’m only a podiatrist,” he told her. “It’s not like I’m a brain surgeon.”

  “The feet are so important,” Gina insisted. Then she ran her fingers lightly up the inside of his arm as she wrote something on his chart. Ted shuddered. Her hand circled and squeezed his wrist. She lifted his index finger and slid it into her mouth. Slowly.

  “I’m married, Gina,” Ted told her.

  “I know,” she said sadly. Then she joked halfheartedly, “Marriage is terrible for the waistline.” She let go of Ted’s hand and bounced out of the room, leaving him wanting more. Hating himself for wanting more. More of the cheerfulness, more of the optimism and attention, more of the warm inside of her mouth.

  Now the thought of the warm inside of Gina’s mouth, the memory of the time at the park under the sleeping bag when she managed to get his pants off (he must have helped!) and started licking the insides of his legs and then everything else as it started to get dark and—Jesus, they could have gotten arrested—sends a shudder through Ted. He shakes his head hard, once, like a dog shaking itself off after bounding out of a pond. He closes his eyes for a second. When he opens them, he’s crested a hill, and a sea of brake lights fills the road before him. He’s going fast now, faster than he realized. There is a nauseating surge of adrenaline, and then he brakes, downshifts, swerves, brakes, and thunk, hits an old pickup teeming with rakes and mowers and blowers and shovels. The truck, just barely creeping along a few inches behind a BMW, smacks the Beemer, which thump, hits a green Passat, which bump, hits some other car that Ted can’t see. All of a sudden a rake from the truck crashes onto his windshield. He is in the far-right lane now. His dress shirt sticks to his back. He pulls into the breakdown lane, peering through the tines of the rake, and turns off his engine.

  To avoid the oncoming traffic, Ted climbs out the passenger’s door of his car. He scrambles along the steep hillside, peering into the window of the truck and apologizing to the three men wedged shoulder-to-shoulder across the bench seat. “Telephone?” one of the men asks. He smiles. Two of his teeth are capped with silver. Ted reaches for his phone in his pocket, then sees that two other people are already making the call.

  Dry grass and brambles nip at Ted’s pants as he makes his way along the edge of the hill to apologize to the woman. “I’m so sorry,” he says through her closed window. “I’ve probably ruined your day.”

  “What?” the woman says, rolling down the passenger’s-side window.

  “Just . . .” Ted mops his brow with the back of his sleeve. “Sorry.”

  “Uh, okay,” the woman says, punching at the keys of a Palm Pilot now.

  “It’s my fault,” Ted tells the officer when he arrives. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

  Back in his car, he buckles his seat belt, even though he’s clearly not going anywhere for a while. The cop nods, reviews Ted’s license and registration. He says that these things happen all the time. This rush-hour stop-and-go traffic is a nightmare. Ted wishes the cop weren’t so understanding. He deserves to be punished. Admonished at least.

  After the cop takes down everyone’s information, the cars start up one by one and pull away. Ted tries to slide his registration back into the glove box, but there’s a bunch of crap in there—plastic forks, dental floss, napkins, straws. Jesus, El, he thinks. Elinor is like a squirrel, always hoarding little stuff. Elinor! Ted has forgotten for a full half hour that his wife has left home, left him, possibly. He crumples the stuff from the glove box into a wad and throws it into the backseat. He can’t drive now.

  He climbs over the passenger’s s
eat and out of his car again. With a scrabble of stones and dry earth under his loafers, he scales the edge of the hill to sit down. Sharp grass pokes at his legs. He looks at his watch: eight fifty. His first patient has been sitting in the waiting room for twenty minutes. He pulls his cellular phone out of his pocket. Three missed calls. He doesn’t want to drive. He phones the office and asks for his partner, Larry, who agrees to cover for him.

  “You okay, buddy?” Larry asks.

  “Elinor moved out.”

  “Jesus. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah . . .” The entire past two years seem to catch in Ted’s throat. “Well,” he says. He wants to tell Larry about Gina and what a screwup he is. But Larry has to run so he can get to all the backed-up patients. They hang up.

  Ted clutches his knees to his chest, balancing a bit precariously on the dry hill beside the freeway. The traffic speeds up. Cars roar past him, hot air tugging at his pants like an undertow.

  Every Thursday afternoon, between one and four, Ted visits his mortality. This is when he makes rounds at the Shady Glen rest home to “chip and clip,” as he and Larry say. To cut old people’s toenails.

  As Ted steps into the home, the double sliding-glass doors whoosh shut behind him. He pauses on the rubber mat, smooths his hands over his white lab coat. He takes a deep breath, immediately wishing he hadn’t. The smells of urine and canned peas and body odor make his eyes tear. He continues down a corridor and is buzzed into the big common room. The whiteboard on the wall is filled with block letters:

  Today is: August 12

  The weather is: Warm

  For lunch we’re having: Spaghetti and meatballs

  You are in: San Jose, California

  A woman slumped in a wheelchair chews on a greeting card.

  What Ted likes about podiatry is that he’s usually able to help people—to alleviate their pain—whether it means trimming a callus or operating on a metatarsal fracture. Yet working at Shady Glen overwhelms him with a sense of futility. Old people’s toenails—impossibly thick and ridged—have a stubborn way of burrowing right back under the flesh to pinch and stab. Instead of helping these patients, Ted senses that he’s barely maintaining their grim status quo. He had this same sense of uselessness during the in-vitro treatments, when there wasn’t anything he could do to improve the situation or make Elinor feel better.

  Ted’s first patient, Mrs. O’Leary, isn’t as old as the other residents. She’s incapacitated by a brain tumor. Her white stubbly hair is as short as a marine’s, and her most recent surgery has left a golf-ball-size dent above one temple. One of her eyes has sunken shut. Her face is swollen from steroids, and all but one of her teeth has fallen out from radiation. She looks like a jack-o’-lantern.

  Mrs. O’Leary is relieved to see Ted. She sits straight up in bed, her one good eye wide and imploring. “Curtis!” she whispers loudly.

  “No, Mrs. O’Leary,” Ted says, “it’s Dr. Mackey. I’ve come to have a look at your feet.” As Ted peels back the covers to examine her dry, pink toes, she lists the rest home’s imprecations in an anxious whisper: The nurses have stolen her checkbook, and someone has built a covered bridge in her room. Could he please issue a press release?

  Ted used to think he should help the patients get a better handle on reality by correcting their senile fantasies. He’s learned, though, that people find it more comforting when you humor them a bit.

  Really? Can you imagine? The nerve! The patients seem relieved that someone’s at least listening and responding.

  Mrs. O’Leary’s nails aren’t so bad, since she’s only in her sixties. When he’s finished clipping, Ted presses on the cushiony pads at the edges of her toes.

  “Any pain?” he asks, to make sure the ingrown nails are gone.

  “Much better,” she sighs.

  Ted rubs cream into her feet, then tucks the covers back over them. Exhausted, he sits down for a moment in the chair beside the bed.

  “How are you, dear?” Mrs. O’Leary asks. Although she’s off her nut, she is one of the sweeter residents. Other patients have screeched at Ted, thrown water on him, cackled and flashed their withered genitalia.

  “My wife left me.” Ted’s words tumble out.

  “That Margaret is no good,” Mrs. O’Leary says conspiratorially, lifting her head from the pillow, her good eye bulging at him.

  Ted shakes his head. “I love her.”

  He never should have put that cookbook in his dresser drawer. That was painful for Elinor to find. But he wasn’t good at hiding things. He never had to create elaborate lies during the affair. Elinor wasn’t interested in spending any time with him, so he could come and go as he pleased. When he returned from a visit with Gina, she never asked where he’d been. It was hard to coax her out of her laundry room/office. He fixed her dinner every night, and she’d come out long enough to eat. Then Ted would clean up while she went back to whatever it was she did in there. “Can’t you just sit at the counter and talk with me while I cook?” he’d asked her. But it was painful when she did. She’d cross her arms against her chest, as though cold, and fidget at the pages of the newspaper without reading it. They’d confirm that their days were fine. They rarely even argued anymore.

  Ted reaches to unclench Mrs. O’s hand from the sheet. “Everything’s going to be all right,” he says, smoothing over her fingers. Ted’s learned that the secret to good bedside manner can be as simple as touching a patient on the hand or arm. Any gentle touch other than an exploratory prod. He stands. “You try not to worry so much,” he tells her.

  He pulls the table with her lunch tray closer. “Vanilla ice cream,” he says, peeling back the cardboard on the little cup. “Have some. The calcium’s good for you.” But Mrs. O has already fallen asleep. Ted looks at the photo on her nightstand. Mrs. O is in her wedding dress, a mass of inky black curls surrounding her rosy face. Her husband, a little bucktoothed, smiles into the camera. They are dancing, nearly airborne.

  “Listen,” an agent from Ted’s insurance company says over the phone later that day, “you don’t need to be so honest.”

  Ted’s laughter comes out sudden and hard, like a bark.

  “You’re not supposed to say anything to the other drivers,” the agent continues. “You’re just supposed to wait for the police.” He sighs. “Tell me your side of the story.”

  My side of the story? Let’s see. I was speeding and thinking about the time I got a blow job at the park from the nutritionist at my gym, then I rear-ended a truck and caused a major pileup on the freeway. “I was going too fast,” Ted tells the agent. “Suddenly I came over a hill and the traffic had slowed way down. I wasn’t paying attention. Was I supposed to lie?”

  Of course not, the agent insists. But now Ted’s rates will go up. He’ll lose his Good Driver discount . . .

  Ted doesn’t care. He’s already lost his Good Husband status. “Is there a point to this phone call?” he asks the agent. “Other than to ride my ass?”

  “Calm down. I just need to hear from you what happened.”

  “And I told you. I was entirely at fault.”

  But is he entirely at fault for his crumbling marriage? The more determined Elinor became about having a baby, the more peripheral Ted felt. Over the months, she turned inward and became angry with him—as though it was his fault they couldn’t conceive. When he touched her, she’d flinch or withdraw. Sometimes when he came into a room, she’d jump, startled by his presence. Ted began to feel unnecessary, then downright repulsive.

  When he suggested a break from the treatments, she accused him of not wanting children. He couldn’t seem to convince her that he did. He’d always hoped for three girls. Little girls killed him. The miscarriage was one of the few times in his life when he’d had a stiff drink before noon.

  And yet he didn’t want to sacrifice their marriage anymore for these crazy shots and trips to the doctor. He used to have this fantasy that he’d come home one day (truly a fantasy, since Elinor always got home
from work after him), and El would be in the kitchen, at the stove, and surprise him with the news of her pregnancy. The announcement would knock the wind out of him. He’d lift Elinor off the floor, carry her to the couch, and coat her face with kisses.

  The agent rattles on about how one woman says she hurt her neck. Ted knows for a fact that pain from whiplash doesn’t set in until the day after the injury, but he doesn’t say anything.

  “Just send me the paperwork,” he tells the agent and finally hangs up. He realizes he’s been clutching his shoe in his hand the entire time he’s been on the phone. He had just walked in the door and was changing to go out for a run. He squeezes the Boston Common oxford with its heel pad for shock absorption, suddenly hating its practicality. He snaps open the sliding-glass door from their bedroom, then chucks the shoe overhead into the yard as hard as he can, as though it’s a football. It clears the entire lawn, piercing the juniper trees. He misses football, which he hasn’t played since high school. He tugs off his other shoe. Lead with the elbow, back foot to front, belly facing the receiver. Bingo. The shoe disappears into the neighbors’ yard.