“She’s a complicated person.” Sid waited for another answer, so I offered, lamely, “Women like your father.”
“Yuck,” she said, but there was a heaviness to her voice, a drip of sadness clogging up her sinuses.
Then her phone buzzed, and she gasped. Alexis was arriving at the train station in fifteen minutes, hoping to be picked up. She had said she was coming, but she hadn’t said when. I was relieved—I didn’t normally enjoy spontaneous guests but I didn’t want to spend time processing what I had seen with Sidney. I felt remiss that I hadn’t parented her out of this shakedown, that I hadn’t told her it was inappropriate for us to go tracking Dad together. Warmed by her attention, by the idea of us as partners, I’d broken a long-held pact I had made with myself to never go chasing after John. And what was I doing inserting Sid into all this? She may be a grown woman, but that didn’t mean the actions of her parents had no effect on her psyche and well-being. Wasn’t it finding out about John and the allegations that had spurred her into the affair with her colleague in the first place, upending her life, forcing her to leave her job, stranding her in her old bedroom turned guest room in her childhood house and town? Without work she was completely adrift, all the running in the world couldn’t counteract the amount she was drinking and eating—she looked perpetually puffy, distended, and ill.
Sid spent most of the ten-minute ride hunched over her phone, texting furiously with Alexis. The pace their thumbs could move. I forced myself to note the scenery around us as I drove. The elementary school, the old post office, the sandwich shop. It wasn’t until we were parked in the pickup area, watching the train pull into the station, that Sid turned to me and said, out of obligation, “How are you feeling about all this?”
I told her I had feelings about it, but I didn’t want her to worry. She was to worry about repairing her own relationship, if that was what she wanted. She took this as offensive.
“What do you mean, if that’s what I want?”
I said I thought that was what she was communicating to me, that she wasn’t sure if she wanted to commit in the way that Alexis was asking. “Not wanting to have a child is not the same thing as not committing,” she snapped.
I nodded. The bond that we had cultivated over the past few weeks was already being severed by the intrusion of her “real” life, which came toward us now in the figure of Alexis, toting a hard-shell rolling suitcase and wearing a very well-tailored power dress with soft leather flats, her braids loosely pulled back in an elaborate gold hair clip that looked like the branches of a tree, adorned with jeweled leaves.
She came around to my window first, greeted me, and told me that she had thought Sid would be the one to pick her up. She was mortified; she hadn’t realized I would have to come out at this time of night.
I told her not to worry, that it was just a coincidence and no trouble. Sid jumped out of the car to help her put her case in the trunk and I listened to their conversation as she rearranged the grocery bags and snow-clearing equipment to make room.
“You look beautiful, Lexi.” I saw Sid perform a half bow of appreciation.
“I was in court today. We got the verdict.” She waited a beat. “Now you’re supposed to say, how’d it go?”
“Sorry, babe. How’d it go?”
“I won.”
“You’re incredible.”
“Tim told me to take the week off.”
“I’m really happy you’re here.”
“Maybe you are, maybe you’re not.”
There was a moment of silence, a touch or a kiss.
“You look rough,” said Alexis, soft care in her voice.
“I know. I miss you.”
Alexis climbed into the backseat and Sid followed her. In the rear-view mirror I watched as Alexis squeezed her leg, scolding. “Babe, your mother is not a chauffeur.”
I spoke into the reflection. “Thank you, Alexis, why don’t you come into the front seat.” We often played the little game parents played with partners, pretending we were more aligned than she and Sid.
“I would love to,” she said, and thanked me again for coming to pick her up. I wished Alexis would be a little less polite with me, it enforced a distance between us. Whenever they visited, she and Sid became a conspiratorial unit, having what I imagined were honest conversations behind the closed door of the guest room and then emerging and making removed small talk with John and me. Still, I liked her considerateness better than Sid’s childhood friends, the entitled spawn of fellow academics who opened my refrigerator without asking, borrowed my books without telling, and on summer days used to drop by and swim in my pool whether Sid was there or not.
“I love your clip,” I said. Awkward around most women, I had trained myself to notice something on their person I could compliment. Compliments made you supplicant, equal, and master all at once. Supplicant because you are below, admiring; equal because you have the same taste; and master because you are bestowing your approval. In my life I’ve been wounded more by compliments than I have by insults. （Once when I asked an acquaintance what they thought of my second novel they said, “I can tell you worked so hard on it.”）
“Thank you,” she said. “A friend made it for me.”
“Who?” Sid asked from the back. And they proceeded to discuss the friend who Sid thought was someone she met at a picnic but realized was someone else she had met at a party.
Excused from the conversation, I let my imagination return to John and Cynthia. The picture they made at the door grew more and more surreal in my mind; they became like figures in a biblical illumination, emanating golden rays. Had Cynthia been wearing an off-the-shoulder bandage dress? Had she been barefoot and standing on her tiptoes? Was she holding a glass of champagne? Was there a red rose wrapped around her upper arm, its thorns drawing blood? No, Cynthia didn’t drink. I didn’t see what she was wearing. She was so attractive I couldn’t help but feel aroused thinking of John feeling up her firm, voluptuous legs. Were she and Vladimir all but divorced? Was he soon to be free?
“Babe,” I heard Alexis caution Sid. “We’ll talk tomorrow. Okay? I’m exhausted. Tonight we’re just going to celebrate.”
My date with Vladimir was two days from now. Did he know? Could I tell him? It struck me that Cynthia had taken Edwina’s affection from me, she would have taken my class had I not resisted, she had Vladimir, whom I wanted, and now she had taken John. For what, for spite? She had youth and a body I always dreamed of, a body that would stay muscled and smooth well past her middle age. She had even, unlined skin and straight white teeth. She had attended the most prestigious writing program in the country, and her work would be better reviewed than mine ever was. She was the survivor of great trauma, she had something to say. I was jealous of every bone in her body, every moment of her history. She was acting wildly, I was jealous of that—jealous of her extremity, the fact that she was drawn to John, for who was the baddest boy on campus right now, who was the ultimate taboo? She had just arrived and was already so reckless—what would happen when the true, three-year-in boredom of small-town life worked on her? I wanted to push her into the mud and kick up great puddles of splattering filth, defiling her face, her clothing, her stylish shoes. I also wanted to worship at her feet, have her tell me all her secrets and methods for living so completely and exactly as she wanted.