Page 75 of Dirty Diana
“That’s what a break is. You leave.”
“What about…”
Neither of us speaks.
I fill the silence with words that say nothing. “I don’t know. Okay…” The doorway where he stands feels so far it might as well be the moon.
“See you later.”
“What hotel are you going to?”
He shrugs, then a sad smile. “Anywhere but the Rosevale.” He grabs his sweatshirt, which I’d hung yesterday on the hook on the back of our door. He doesn’t pause at the threshold, doesn’t turn around, just closes the door. I listen to the sound of his feet on the stairs, his car door opening, him pulling away.
To the back of the door I ask, “So that’s it?”
Chapter 23
—
Eric shimmies up to the table carrying a fresh round of drinks. He sings a Billy Idol song from at least a decade before he was born. “In the midnight hour, she cried more, more, more!” Then he adds his own sparkle, “More Ladies’ Night!” With a flourish, he places a glass of rosé in front of L’Wren and a martini in front of me, vodka splashing from the glass. “What are we eating tonight, ladies, the usual?”
“Actually, hon, we need another minute.” The first couple times Eric danced up to our table, L’Wren gave him a kittenish grin, but his shtick has grown tired and her tone is more bored than coquettish. “This is a serious question,” she says, as he walks away. “Do you think that routine gets him laid?”
I smile for the first time since we sat down. I’m grateful to be herewith L’Wren, for finally coming to my senses and opening up to her. And here we are at P.F. Chang’s, looking like a pair of eHarmony hopefuls, drinking away my marriage sorrows.
L’Wren swirls the wine in her glass. “So…strippers? That’s his thing, huh?”
I shrug and take a long drink. I’m drinking too fast. My head swims with the din of restaurant noise and Eric’s singing from another table. I tell L’Wren how Oliver came home from the strip club that one night smelling like a Yankee candle.
“And the jerk didn’t even bother to take a shower first? After being in a place like that?”
“No.”
“Oh. My. God. Fucking, Oliver. He’s thenice one!”
“Turns out…” I know I should come all the way clean. About me going to the club with Oliver, about every terrible thing we’ve said to each other. I’m so pathetically desperate to have L’Wren fully on my side that I can’t be totally honest. I still want to be the person L’Wren thinks I am—a grounded, good person who wants all the same things in life that she does. But of course I’m naive for assuming I know what anyone really wants.
I’m about to tell her about the Dirty Diana site, to see what she thinks, when she shakes her head. “Everyone has secrets. No one really knows the real anybody.” L’Wren chews delicately, seemingly lost in thought.
A week after Oliver moved into a hotel, we clumsily explained things to Emmy. I called in sick to work all week, partly because I was too sad to get dressed and partly because I couldn’t face everyone at the office yet.
At the end of the first week, when it was clear Oliver wasn’t coming home for the weekend, he and I sat Emmy down on the sofa. We told her we were seeing a counselor to help us “work out our differences.”
“Daddy is going to take a break,” I said.
Oliver shot me a look. “We’retaking a break. It just means different arrangements and that you’ll be loved under two roofs.”
Oliver must have googled that line.
“A break?” Emmy looked from me to Oliver and back to me.
I turned to Oliver with the same question in my eyes. The break I had suggested was supposed to have been met with vehement protest and quickly forgotten about, but the longer it lasts, the scarier it feels.
“It means,” Oliver said, “that your mother and I both love you very much, and no matter what happens between the two of us, we’ll always be your parents and you are always the most important person in the world to us.”
Again, Emmy looked at us both. After a quiet moment she said, “I don’t want to watch your explosion.”
Then she tented her fingers together—I guess like the sides of a volcano—and made the sound of an eruption as her hands broke apart.
