We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [187]
Franklin, I’d never appreciated how much energy you expended to maintain the fiction that we were a broadly happy family whose trifling, transient problems just made life more interesting. Maybe every family has one member whose appointed job is to fabricate this attractive packaging. In any event, you had abruptly resigned. In one form or another, we had visited this conversation countless times, with the habitual loyalty that sends other couples to the same holiday home every summer. But at some point such couples must look about their painfully familiar cottage and admit to each other, Next year we’ll have to try somewhere else.
You pressed your fingers into your eye sockets. “I thought we could make it until the kids were out of the house.” Your voice was gray. “I even thought that if we made it that far, maybe ... But that’s ten years from now, and it’s too many days. I can take the years, Eva. But not the days.”
I had never so fully and consciously wished that I had never borne our son. In that instant I might even have forgone Celia, whose absence a childless woman in her fifties would not have known well enough to rue. From a young age there was only one thing I had always wanted, along with getting out of Racine, Wisconsin. And that was a good man who loved me and would stay true. Anything else was ancillary, a bonus, like frequentflier miles. I could have lived without children. I couldn’t live without you.
But I would have to. I had created my own Other Woman who happened to be a boy. I’d seen this in-house cuckolding in other families, and it’s odd that I’d failed to spot it in ours. Brian and Louise had split ten years before (all that wholesomeness had been a little meat-and-potatoes for him, too; at a party for his fifteenth wedding anniversary, a jar of pickled walnuts smashed on the floor, and he got caught fucking his mistress in the walk-in pantry), and of course Brian was far more upset about separation from those two blond moppets than about leaving Louise. There shouldn’t be any problem loving both, but for some reason certain men choose; like good mutual-fund managers minimizing risk while maximizing portfolio yield, they take everything they once invested in their wives and sink it into children instead. What is it? Do they seem safer, because they need you? Because you can never become their ex-father, as I might become your ex-wife? You never quite trusted me, Franklin. I took too many airplanes in the formative years, and it never entirely registered that I always bought a round-trip.
“What do you want to do?” I asked. I felt light-headed.
“Last out the school year, if we can. Make arrangements over the summer.
“At least custody is a no-brainer, isn’t it?” you added sourly. “And doesn’t that say it all.”
At the time, of course, we had no way of knowing that you would keep Celia, too.
“Is it—?” I didn’t want to sound pitiful. “You’ve decided.”
“There’s nothing left to decide, Eva,” you said limply. “It’s already happened.”
Had I imagined this scene—and I had not, for to picture such things is to invite them—I’d have expected to stay up until dawn draining a bottle, agonizing over what went wrong. But I sensed that if anything we would turn in early. Like toasters and sub-compacts, one only tinkers with the mechanics of a marriage in the interests of getting it up and running again; there’s not much point in poking around to see where the wires have disconnected prior to throwing the contraption away. What’s more, though I’d have expected to cry, I found myself all dried up; with the house overheated,