Beautiful Day

DOUG

In the master bedroom, in the king bed, Pauline reached for him. Her hands, with nails newly painted the color of brewing storm clouds, wrapped around his biceps. She pulled herself in close and breathed in his ear. Then the flat of her palm ran down his bare chest, over the softer flesh at his belly, and across the front of his boxers. Nothing.

This wasn’t unusual. Doug was getting older, and he didn’t always snap to attention the way he used to. He had considered seeing Dr. Fraker and getting a prescription, but that seemed like an admission of defeat. The only way he’d been able to sustain an erection with Pauline recently was to imagine her with Russell Stern from the Wee Burn Country Club. This was twisted, Doug knew-fantasizing about his wife with another man. And it couldn’t be any other man, either; it couldn’t be Arthur Tonelli or George Clooney. It had to be Russell Stern. Doug worried that he was somehow attracted to Russell Stern. Perhaps this was an indication of a latent homosexual urge? But further pondering brought Doug to the conclusion that he had been most attracted to Pauline when he’d suspected that Russell Stern was pursuing her. It had increased Pauline’s desirability. That Pauline and Russell Stern had once been a couple made it even better. Sometimes Doug fantasized about Pauline in her short, pleated cheerleader skirt and Russell in football pads taking her from behind in what he imagined to be the fetid air of the New Canaan High School locker room.

But that vision wasn’t working tonight. Nothing would work tonight. Nothing, Doug thought sadly, would work ever again. His sex life with Pauline was over.

He gathered her wandering hand in both of his and squeezed it. He wanted to be kind to her, but so often, kind was mistaken for patronizing.

“Pauline,” he said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I understand, I get it, it’s only natural that you’d be thinking of her.”

“Thinking of whom?”

“Beth.”

“I wasn’t thinking of Beth.”

Pauline rolled over on her side so that her back was to him. “Of course you were.”

He wanted to say, Don’t tell me what I was or was not thinking about. You aren’t a mind reader. But Doug didn’t want to pick a fight. He didn’t want to act like any of his clients. People going through a divorce faced heightened emotion every single day. Just last week, Doug had received an e-mail in which the subject line read “Rough Morning.” The message consisted of a detailed description of how contentious the before-school routine in the Blahblahblah household had become. Mom and Dad both lived in the same apartment building, and little Sophie and slightly older Daniel were shuttled up and down on the elevator in search of clean clothes, breakfast, and homework while Mom and Dad screamed profanities at each other on their cell phones. Doug had read and answered a thousand such e-mails; he had a front-row seat for every imaginable variety of domestic discord. He loathed the thought of anyone-another lawyer, a therapist, or Rhonda-being privy to the inner workings of his relationship with Pauline. He just wanted the marriage to quietly go away. He wanted it to be a soap bubble he could pop with his finger.

“I wasn’t thinking of Beth,” Doug whispered.

“What were you thinking of, then?” Pauline asked.

He didn’t answer. Pauline’s insistence that he was thinking of Beth led him to think of Beth. He thought about their wedding, which had been held in New York City. The ceremony at St. James’ on Seventy-first Street, the reception at the Quilted Giraffe, wedding night at the Pierre Hotel, where they had arrived, giddy and exhausted, at three in the morning, after a late-night excursion to Chinatown because Beth had been so busy talking and having her picture taken at the reception that she hadn’t eaten a thing, and she found herself with an insane craving for soup dumplings.

Doug remembered sitting across the tiny, soy-sticky table holding Beth’s hand as she slurped her soup dumplings. She was still in her white dress. The old Chinese women fussed over her; they petted her hair, they admired her ring. Doug remembered wanting to shoo them away like flies.

On the way back to the Pierre, Doug had asked Beth how many children she thought they should have.

“Four,” she said. “Two boys and two girls.”

That had seemed like a tall order to Doug, but all he’d wanted at that moment, and every moment after, was to make Beth happy.

“You got it,” he’d said.

In the next instant, Doug had watched all the traffic lights on Park Avenue, as far as he could see, turn green at once. It had been a moment of electrifying synchronicity.

The last page of the Notebook, he wondered. What did it say?