Happiness Sold Separately Read online

He turns to their bed—a California king. It’s too big when he and Elinor sleep together. There’s no way he’s crawling in there alone. For the past two months, they’ve gone through the nights barely touching. Elinor would utter the requisite “I love you” and drift off almost before Ted could reply. He’d lie there wishing they would talk before falling asleep, the way they used to. Wishing they’d make love. “How was your day?” he’d ask loudly, angrily, startling Elinor awake. “What?” she’d gasp. “Fine! I was sleeping!”

  Now he’s depressed by the fact that when he thinks about sex, he thinks about Gina. He has to strain to recall intimacy with his own wife. He whips off his tie and throws it toward the closet, where it lands draped across Elinor’s sneaker. He lunges into the closet, scooping up shoes and hurling them out into the backyard. Sneakers, clogs, hiking boots. His, hers, whatever he can get his hands on. Screw this. What happened to the woman he married? He needs to get his wife back. Get her back into their house and then to the marriage counselor. Figure out what the hell happened to them.

  He slams the sliding-glass door shut, then heads for the bathroom to take a long shower.

  After changing into jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers—one of which he has to retrieve from the lawn—Ted feels calmer. He grabs the phone book and calls the Hyatt downtown. He’ll check in down the street from Elinor. She’ll think that’s funny. He’ll call and invite her over for room service at his place. Neutral territory. The therapist always crows about this.

  At the Hyatt, Ted peels the stiff bedspread off the bed and looks out the fourth-floor window up the street to the Fairmont. His hands are cold and sweaty at the same time. Finally, he picks up the phone to call El.

  “We have room service over here, too, you know.” He laughs nervously.

  Elinor’s tone is calm, distracted, yet all-business. She’s not charmed. She can’t have dinner with him because she’s about to check out and leave for the airport. She’s going for two weeks to stay with her mother, who’s just gotten home from rehab after having a knee replacement. Elinor’s got the vacation time, God knows.

  “Let me drive you,” Ted says.

  “No thanks, sweetie,” El says. “Kat’s going to take me.”

  The calmer her tone, the more panicked Ted becomes. She sounds as though she’s got everything figured out. What if everything includes leaving Ted forever? There’s a burning in his trachea that feels like a pill stuck there.

  “Call me when you get there?” Ted crumples onto the bed. Elinor’s like a departing train. Doors hissing and closing, speed gathering. Ted’s running on the platform.

  Elinor says she’ll phone to let him know that she’s arrived, but then she’ll need a real break, and doesn’t want to talk during the two weeks she’ll be away. She’ll call him when she gets back.

  “Then we’ll go to the counselor?” Ted asks. “I’ll make the appointment.”

  “Okay.” Elinor pauses. “How are you?”

  “Great,” Ted says, immediately regretting the sarcasm in his voice. He wants to keep things civil. “I sort of had an—”

  “Do you think this knee surgery will alleviate my mom’s pain?” El’s breathing is labored as she gathers her things. “She says it hurts more now.”

  “—accident. Oh, the prognosis is usually very good. Even in the elderly. It should relieve a lot of her pain once she makes it through a few more weeks of physical therapy.”

  “Wait, what kind of accident?” Ted can hear that Elinor has stopped moving around the room.

  “In the car. It was minor. Everything’s okay.” He decides not to go into the details. “Hey, depending on how your mom’s doing, maybe she could come and stay with us.” Right. Like that’s going to save their marriage. He clenches his fists, trying to wring out the feeling of helplessness.

  “Ha, she’d never budge. Hey!” Elinor’s voice brightens. Ted thinks maybe she’s got some good news—an idea for how they can work things out. “I swam fifty laps in the hotel pool today.”

  “Oh. That’s great.” Yeah, it’s great that your wife’s at the Fairmont! “Don’t you think . . . Don’t you want to talk?” He stands. “El, I want you to know how sorry I am.”

  Elinor sighs. “That’s the problem. I don’t think I’m capable of talking, Ted. I can scream, I can break things, but I don’t think I can talk.”

  “So scream.”

  “I don’t . . .” She pauses, starts to cry, then catches her breath. “. . . want to.”

  Great. He’s managed to make her feel even worse. “Come in!” she calls out to someone at the door. “I’ve got to run,” she tells Ted. “We’ll talk. Of course we’ll talk. I just need some time. Jesus Christ, Ted.”

  “I know,” Ted says. “I’m . . . Travel safe.”

  “Always do,” El says. “Bye.”

  “I love you.” Dial tone. Too late.

  Ted hangs up and looks at the expansive California king bed in his hotel room. He opens his suitcase, takes out his toothbrush, brushes his teeth, shakes off the toothbrush, then puts it back in his bag and zips it shut. The Hyatt is just as lonely as their house. He envies Elinor’s break—the change of scenery. The distraction of a flight to catch. Her mother’s grocery list waiting on the kitchen counter. The fulfillment of being able to care for someone. Ted picks up his suitcase, shaking his head. He has checked into a hotel room to phone his wife and brush his teeth.

  Dizzy, hands shaking, Ted realizes on his way home from the Hyatt that he hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast. He stops off at the Country Kitchen Café, where the food is healthy and comforting. He orders black bean soup, grilled chicken, brown rice, and a fruit plate.

  After the waitress leaves, he covers his face with his hands. This day has seemed as long as a week. He doesn’t want to go home. Hell, he should sleep in his car. He rubs his face and forehead until his eyes squeak. When he opens them he sees a swirl of spots, then an attractive foot sticking out from the booth up ahead. Ted’s always a bit myopic when he’s out in public, homing in on feet and shoes.

  He looks at the straight, longish tanned toes painted with pink polish. They’re remarkably well shaped. No weird knobby middle toe. Silver toe ring. Purple Reef flip-flops. A good choice if you’re going to wear thongs. The flare of a long skirt falls softly around the ankle. Gina. Gina’s flowing paisley skirt. Gina’s perfectly formed pink foot. Ted looks up and sees the back of her head. Long, light brown hair, smooth and soft. The individual strands are thin, but there’s so much of it that it forms a thick curtain that is lovely to burrow through, to hide behind. Gina. Well, she is the one who turned him on to this restaurant.

  Ted slides down in his booth, his chin resting on his chest.

  “Tired?” the waitress asks, setting the fruit plate before him.

  “Whipped.” Ted peers around the edge of his booth. There are two places set at Gina’s table. Her dining partner is in the bathroom or somewhere. Gina tips her head back, drinking her white wine too quickly. She does this when she’s nervous. As self-confident and firm as she is, there’s always an undercurrent of nervousness, of wanting to please. Once, Ted took her cheeks in his hands, held her gaze, and said, “Relax.”

  Maybe she’s nervous because she’s on a date. Ted leans farther out of his booth, slipping on the Naugahyde and nearly tumbling onto the floor. He grabs the table, knocking his glass, water sloshing out. Gina’s dining partner seems to be having soda instead of wine. Maybe it’s one of her DUI boyfriends. Suddenly Ted can’t stand the thought of this Pepsi drinker kissing Gina. Someone else having her lips, pouty and always slightly sweet and shiny with that pink lip stuff. Gina is a good kisser. This is what got to Ted first. The way she would trace the outline of his mouth with her tongue, nibble his lower lip, and sink her teeth in just enough to make his scalp tingle. Then she’d draw his lip into her mouth and slowly suck on it, mimicking something even better to come. Ted bangs the heel of his palm on the table. Jealous of an empty place setting! Jesus. While try
ing to reconcile with his wife. He ducks back into his booth and stabs a crescent of honeydew with his fork.

  A thin boy stumbles around the corner from the restroom and ambles up to Gina’s table. A thick tangle of honey-colored curls falls into his eyes. He’s probably around eight. He collapses heavily into the booth across from Gina as though defeated by something.

  Who’s the kid? Ted wonders, holding the chunk of honeydew up on his fork like a flag.

  Just then the boy points to something behind Ted. Gina turns to look, squinting, her chin tipped up, her mouth slightly open. The restaurant has all kinds of wacky stuff on the walls—everything from moose heads to C-list celebrity photos.

  Gina’s eyes widen and her mouth drops open. “Ted.” She smiles, then seems to catch herself, suppressing her usual cheer. “Ted?”

  “Hi.” Ted waves his honeydew feebly.

  The waitress appears, Ted’s salad resting on her hip. “Wanna join them?” She takes a step toward Gina’s booth with the salad.

  “I . . .” Ted lowers his fork.

  “Sure.” Gina laughs nervously. “Join us.” She moves over in her booth to make room.

  The kid wrinkles his nose, stuffs a french fry into his mouth.

  Ted swallows and spreads his hands across the table, bracing himself.

  3

  You probably shouldn’t cut your own hair a week after you discover your husband has slept with another woman. Yet Elinor has used common sense all her life and where has it gotten her?

  She leans over the sink in the bathroom at her mother’s house in Ohio and studies herself in the mirror. Her straight blond hair is cut evenly at the ends, falling just below her shoulders. Too sensible. Sensible haircut pulled into a French braid, low-heeled shoes, successful career. Egg-quality issues. She wants something sexier. One of those shaggy cuts she’s seen on movie stars in magazines. A crazy mop of varying lengths, with bangs that fall mischievously into the eyes. She bunches her hair up over her forehead to get an idea of how it should be. When she lets it drop, it falls neatly back into place, too thick and stubborn to look tousled.

  Elinor pads out to the living room, where her mother is stretched on the couch, one leg elevated on a pillow, a black zipper of stitches running down her knee. A cigarette burns in an ashtray on the end table beside her. Somewhere along the way, Beatrice shrank. Now she’s a corn husk floating in a blue terry-cloth robe.

  “Ma? You have any sharp scissors?” Elinor raises her voice over the blare of the TV.

  “Stupid!” her mother whoops, engaged in her morning ritual of chiding the contestants on The Price Is Right. Beatrice points without taking her eyes off Bob Barker. “Laundry room.”

  “Awwww,” the audience laments when a woman is far from guessing the price of a microwave.

  The drapes are drawn. Bob Barker’s dentures are the only flash of light in the dark living room. He’s thin and weathered and tanning-booth brown. Elinor pulls open the curtains. She feels guilty that she’s depressed by her mother—by the dim, musty condo and the sight of her parked in front of the TV all day. The house smells like cigarette smoke and Lysol and the Jones pork sausage that her mother burns in a skillet every morning. She tugs open the sliding-glass door to let in some air.

  Beatrice points to the TV. “Oh, now there’s glare.” She sighs. “Why do I watch this crap anyway?”

  “You don’t read anymore?” Elinor hopes this doesn’t sound critical. Her mother used to plow through a library book a week.

  “I just read the same paragraph over and over. My concentration has gone the way of my bone density. Can’t read, can’t open jars, can’t dance.”

  Beatrice’s exasperation with aging troubles Elinor. “With any luck I won’t wake up,” she’d grumbled over the phone before the surgery.

  “You never even liked to dance,” she reminds her mother.

  “I didn’t? See. I can’t remember.”

  “Yes, you can.” This comes out sounding like an accusation.

  Her mother points at Bob Barker. “That man looks like human beef jerky.”

  “Can I get you anything?” Elinor tries to sound more cheerful. “Maybe I could rent us some movies.” She stubs out her mother’s cigarette when she isn’t looking.

  “You could take me out back and shoot me.”

  Elinor feels her chin quiver and her eyes burn. “Don’t say that.”

  Beatrice struggles among the cushions to sit up and look at Elinor. Her face darkens when their eyes meet. “Sweetheart, I’m joking.” She mutes the TV. “Lighten up, for your old ma.”

  Elinor recalls the voice of her father, who died of a heart attack during her first year in law school. “Smile, Ellie,” her dad would often say, punching her lightly on the shoulder. She was a serious child, always reading. “I’m okay,” she’d insist. People thought she was frowning when, really, she was just concentrating. Concentrating on the wrong things, apparently. When Elinor was paying attention to her career, she should have been paying attention to her biological clock. When she was paying attention to her biological clock, she should have been paying attention to her husband.

  “Why do you think you put off having children?” the marriage counselor asked at their first meeting. Elinor explained that she hadn’t meant to: She met Ted when she was thirty-five; they married seven months later, when she was thirty-six. Shortly after her thirty-seventh birthday, she went off the pill and started prenatal vitamins, and they tried for a year to get pregnant. At thirty-eight, her OB handed her a list of infertility clinics. By the time Elinor and Ted found the right doctor, made their way up the waiting list, had all the tests, went through three intrauterine inseminations, the miscarriage and its recovery period, a hysteroscopy, and two failed in vitros, her fortieth birthday had arrived. Suddenly she was forty and childless. But how could she have been any more proactive?

  “I’m sorry to be glum, honey,” Beatrice says. “I just don’t feel well.”

  “I know.” Elinor unmutes the TV. Her mother just wants to watch her show. She should stop futzing with her environment. She realizes how helpless Ted must have felt when trying to comfort her during the IVF treatments. “Can I get you anything?” he’d ask sweetly. When Elinor shook her head, Ted would look disappointed, pained.

  “Honey, you know, you can go home now.” Beatrice smiles, tilts her head, and looks at Elinor with a puzzled expression. “I’m okay on my own. Really. Go see that sweet hubby of yours.”

  Elinor hasn’t bothered her mother with the news of Ted’s affair, with the fact that her marriage is falling apart.

  “I can’t change my ticket,” Elinor says, even though she probably could, for a fee. Besides, she likes helping her mother—doling out prescriptions, fixing meals on trays, refreshing ice packs, holding on to her brittle arm as they wobble up the stairs together at night. She needs her mother to need her. This is part of what she looked forward to about having a child: having someone to care for. Coats to button, noses to wipe, nerves to soothe. Meanwhile, she overlooked the fact that Ted needed her all along—for love, sex, attention, companionship. All the elements of a good marriage.

  The only scissors in the laundry room are pinking shears. Maybe they’re just the thing for a shaggy look. Elinor spreads newspaper across the sink. Pulling a strand above her head, she makes a quick chop. The hair comes away in her hand, silky and soft. She immediately misses it. Unlike most of her friends, she hasn’t had to color her hair. Her custard-yellow shade isn’t prone to graying. Maybe it would have been better to let it grow long. Long blond hair down to her waist. That would have been sexy.

  She studies herself in the mirror. Ted says Elinor’s face is heart-shaped, an observation that secretly thrills her. She finds her face too long, her chin too pointed. What she considers a pug nose, Ted claims is a button nose. He always makes her feel prettier than she thinks she is.

  “You look great for your age,” Gina chirped at the club. As she tugged out her ponytail to refasten it
, her light brown hair fanned around her waist—thin and wispy and ethereal. Collegiate.

  Elinor doesn’t know how to be the right kind of mad about the affair. She wants to either fly home, crash into the gym, and shove her fist through Gina’s charming overbite, or curl into a catatonic ball at the foot of her mother’s bed. She doesn’t know how to be taking-care-of-business mad. Dignified.

  The shorter, jagged piece of hair does have a nicely unkempt look. Elinor lifts another chunk and makes a quick angled snip. The hair falls with a flicking noise onto the newspaper, hitting the Dear Abby column.

  Dear Abby: My husband had an affair. Elinor works her way around the crown of her head, trying to remember hairdressers’ techniques. The scissors creak and snip. Soon a small haystack of hair covers the crossword and horoscopes.

  Creak, snip. Abby, I could have been nicer to Ted. Elinor resented Ted’s resistance to adoption, and his relief when they quit the infertility treatments. That annoying spring in his step. She snapped at him for insignificant mistakes, such as forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning. Anger poured from her before she could stop it, like throwing up before you can make it to the bathroom. But bitterness proved to be a useless defense mechanism, like an insect that dies after it stings.

  “This is hard on me, too,” Ted insisted. There was a twinge of guilt in his voice, as though he wasn’t allowed to say this.

  “I know, sweetie,” Elinor would reply. All you have to do is land sperm in a cup! Still, she knew it must have been difficult for him. Strangers critiquing his sperm, the dwindling hope of ever becoming a father. Maybe Ted needed to feel sexy, too. Elinor smacks the scissors on the bathroom counter, thinking of Gina’s bare, flat belly above the waist of her low-slung workout pants. Of how Ted’s hand lightly cupped the small of Gina’s back as they headed into Healthy Oats.

  Ted can shove his flax up his ass. Creak, snip, creak, snip, creak, snip. She hates that she misses him. Misses his smell, which is like pine trees, and the warmth of his stocky body in bed. Strong thighs, muscular arms, sloped shoulders. Bear hugs that shut out the rest of the world. She misses those few minutes they spend in bed every morning after the alarm goes off, looking out the windows at their garden. Ted always wakes up in a good mood. Even if they’ve argued the night before, everything has rolled off his back by morning. And he always laughs at Elinor’s jokes, no matter how dark. After their first date, Elinor called her mother to say, “He gets me.”