The Teacher(27)

Piazza is a popular Italian restaurant about ten minutes away from here. It’s cheap and fast. Not exactly the kind of place I dream about going to on a special occasion, but I have a feeling nothing about this night is going to be anything special. May as well make the picture complete.

“Sure,” he says.

As always, Nate drives. He turns up the classical music station to a high enough volume that we don’t need to speak to each other. When we first got married, I thought about what future birthdays would be like with this man. He was so affectionate, I used to think that at thirty or forty or even eighty, we wouldn’t be able to keep our hands off each other. I never imagined we would be driving to a birthday dinner at a cheap Italian restaurant, struggling to find something to say.

“We have some good talent this year on the poetry magazine,” he says.

“Oh, that’s great,” I say, even though I literally could not possibly care less.

“Those raw emotions are so intense. Only a teenager could write something so utterly compelling.”

I nod. “All those hormones. I can’t even remember what it was like to feel everything so strongly. But I know I did.”

My husband is quiet then, lost in thought. He always seems like he’s a million miles away these days. We have the same job, so it seems like it should be easy to come up with something to say to each other, yet we can’t. We have become strangers to each other.

Maybe this is my fault. Maybe I need to try harder to connect with him. When we were first together, we used to sit in the park together, curled up under a tree, and he would read poetry to me. If he suggested such a thing now, I would roll my eyes at him. I liked the poems he wrote for me, because they came from his heart, but I never enjoyed poetry in general. It all seemed so silly—especially the ones that don’t even rhyme. I mean, I’m a math teacher. I would sooner sit in the park with him and solve quadratic equations.

Maybe I should suggest it now. Maybe this weekend, we can go to the park and share some poetry. And maybe I need to cool things down with Jay. As much as that tryst has meant to me, if I have any interest in saving my marriage, hooking up with another man is not the best way to go about it.

I’ve decided—tomorrow, on the second day of my fourth decade of life, I’m going to make things right. I’m going to spend more time with Nate, and I’m going to tell Jay that it’s over.

When we get to Piazza, Nate pulls into a spot at the end of the parking lot, as far as he can get from the restaurant. He does that all the time. There are plenty of parking spots right next to the door, and yet he parks half a mile away.

“Can you park a little closer?” I say.

He throws the car into park and frowns at me. “What are you talking about? I’m already parked.”

“Right, but there are other spots that are closer.”

“You really want me to take my car out of the spot and then move to a different spot, like, ten feet away?”

“It’s not ten feet. And you’re not wearing four-inch heels.”

His eyes flicker down to my Louis Vuitton pumps. “Well, who told you to wear those anyway?” He narrows his eyes. “Are those new? They look expensive.”

“I’ve had them for ages. I wore them for my birthday last year.” I can’t help but think to myself that Jay would recognize these shoes.

“Yeah, right,” he mutters under his breath.

Nate climbs out of the car, and I hurry after him, although it’s hard to keep up in these shoes. They are absolutely gorgeous, but nobody is going to argue that they’re comfortable. “What is that supposed to mean?”

He doesn’t slow down to give me a chance to keep up. “I mean, we’ll see how new they are when we get the credit card bill, won’t we?”

I want to tell him how unfair that is, but the truth is, the credit card will have a few surprises on it for him. I hate that he is the one who always pays it. It’s this habit we got into years ago. When we got married, all our money was pooled together. I can’t do anything or buy anything without him knowing about it.

Me telling him that I want my own credit card and my own bank account might not be a step in the right direction for our marriage. Then again, he doesn’t seem to care about these things as much as he used to. When I would go out without him, he used to ask me so many questions about where I was going and what I would be doing, and now it’s like he doesn’t care at all. He’s just glad I’m out of the house.

Nate at least holds the door open for me when we get to the restaurant. I’ve already decided I’m going to get the most decadent dessert on the menu. I deserve one treat today, considering the only present I’ve received the entire day from my birthday is a key chain from Shelby that she got in Cape Cod.

“Table for two,” Nate tells the hostess. She’s a busty blond in her twenties, and I’m glad to see at the very least he isn’t staring at her breasts.

“It’s my birthday,” I blurt out.

I don’t know why I said that. Nate looks slightly mortified, but I’ve only got a few hours left of this day, and I just want somebody to acknowledge that it’s special for me. But it’s not that gratifying when the hostess flashes me a quick smile, says happy birthday, and then leads us to the same crappy table we were going to get anyway. She doesn’t take us to some special birthday table covered with streamers, not that I was expecting anything like that.