So We Can Glow Read online

  “Tonight? Let’s go with the Rangers,” Adam said. He was a Cubs fan but they weren’t playing.

  “I’m for the Angels,” Ivy said.

  “Me too,” Minnie tacked on.

  Adam looked at them, drank his whiskey.

  “You should never root against angels, Daddy,” Ivy warned.

  “Of course not,” Adam said, giving up too easily.

  “Ivy, scoot off to bed. I have to practice downstairs,” Minnie said.

  “But I want Daddy to tell me about the play.”

  Ivy got up and plopped into Adam’s lap. It was his turn to be hatched.

  “Ten minutes,” Minnie said to both of them before getting up and going downstairs.

  * * *

  Minnie closed the basement door, got out her cello. She ran through the pieces they always played at the weddings, the pieces she could play in her sleep, to warm up her fingers. Tchaikovsky, Bach. In between, she heard Adam’s deep voice murmuring upstairs, followed by Ivy’s giggles and conversation. Minnie pulled out the new sheet music, stared at it until her eyes went out of focus, until the black notes slipped down the white page and blurred away. Ivy tapped gently on the basement door and Minnie told her to come down.

  “Night, Mommy,” Ivy said, hugging her neck.

  “Goodnight, pigeon.” Minnie put her arms around her daughter, kissed the top of her head.

  Ivy went up, closed the door again.

  Minnie had taken her phone downstairs in the pocket of her pajama pants. She pulled it out and texted Connor.

  Wanna FaceTime this new piece?

  She imagined Connor in bed already, his wife sleeping next to him. Minnie pictured his face, lit up with the phone light, reading her text. She rosined her bow, tuned. Waited for Connor to text her. If Adam had ever come right out and asked Minnie if she had a crush on Connor, Minnie would have told Adam yes. But Adam hadn’t asked. Adam wasn’t even particularly jealous. Everything he did was a reaction to Minnie, her jealousy. And Minnie liked to lean into the lion’s mouth of her jealousy, let it snap shut.

  She was in the lion’s mouth when she got a response from Connor.

  Fuck yeah!

  She smiled, looking at his fuck yeah. Exclamation point. She thought of his mouth shaping the words and her thighs warmed. She considered Adam dozing off on the couch upstairs, his glasses on the small table next to him. She could hear the low mutter of the TV, the baseball commentary, the rhythmic clapping. Something important must’ve been happening. Minnie pulled her hair up, a sloppy bun at the crown, smoothed the strays behind her ears. She was wearing an old T-shirt she’d gotten on their honeymoon, now ratty and worn, with a big faded pineapple on the front of it. It was her favorite, the softest. She answered when she saw her phone screen light up.

  “Heyyy there, Minnie Mouse,” Connor said.

  “Hey,” she said, wondering if Adam could hear her or if he really was sleeping. She thought about going upstairs to check but decided not to.

  She could see that Connor was wearing a ratty T-shirt too and a pair of sweatshorts. Minnie’s desire flickered at the intimacy of it. Connor usually practiced in his basement too. His was finished like theirs, with cushy carpet and a row of paperbacks and college textbooks behind him.

  “You want to play it together to see what we’ve got?” he asked.

  “Okay,” she said, suddenly feeling quiet. She’d wanted to see his face on her phone, she wanted to play, but now she was tired. Tired of everything.

  “I was drinking a vodka tonic. A vodka tonic with lime,” Connor said.

  “Are you drunk?” she asked.

  “Off one vodka tonic? I’m offended.”

  “Well, I don’t know how many you’ve had!”

  “Oh, Minnie Mouse, are you in a fussy mood? Have you eaten?”

  “Yes, I’ve eaten! Stop that! I’m fine,” she said, laughing lightly.

  “You’re the WORST when you’re hangry,” he said, readjusting his camera so he could sit in his chair properly. He put his viola underneath his chin. He looked buzzed, his hair bed-headish. She’d seen him buzzy and drunk before and easily recognized the familiar wide, sheepish grin.

  “Are we going to play this or are you going to bug me instead?”

  “I may be a little drunk,” Connor admitted. He let his viola rest on his knee, looked right into his phone camera. He made a tiny space between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Asshole,” Minnie said.

  Connor lifted his viola, put it under his chin again and played the beginning of the new piece perfectly. Minnie watched, listened. Then he played Beyoncé’s “Halo” for her too. They played it together at weddings sometimes. It was one of Minnie’s favorites. Afterward, Connor put his viola on the floor next to him, picked up his phone, looked into the camera.

  Minnie covered her face, turned the phone away.

  “Hey, are you okay? What’s going on?” Connor’s voice said out at her.

  “Nothing. I’m fine,” she said. She was crying. She sniffed.

  “Well, turn the damn phone around so I can see you please. You don’t sound fine. Wilhelmina!”

  She wiped her eyes, turned the phone around.

  “Wilhelmina, why are you sad?” Connor asked. He relaxed his body, leaning back and balancing his left ankle on his right knee.

  “I’m not. It’s the song.”

  “Where’s Adam?”

  “Upstairs.” Minnie used the collar of her shirt to wipe her eyes some more.

  “What else are you thinking about?” Connor asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Minnie sniffed again and with her tender, wavy, cry-voice, told Connor she wanted to run through the piece a couple times. So they did and they sounded lovely together. It would sound even better tomorrow with both violins. Minnie and Connor sat there looking at one another for a little too long.

  “All right, little Minnie Mouse…I guess I’m going to hit the hay,” Connor said as he put his viola in the case. Minnie caught a glimpse of the plush, gold lining. He lay down on the floor, his head leaning against his hand.

  “Connor, do you think Adam is having an affair with Caitriona?” Minnie asked, lowering her voice and leaning closer to her screen. She blew her nose and left the tissue in a small, tight ball next to her foot. She turned, double-checking the basement door, knowing full-well Adam slept like the dead. Connor didn’t know-know Caitriona but he’d seen her around enough at the theatre, the art center, the city.

  “What?” He shook his head.

  “You heard me.”

  “No, I do not think Adam is having an affair with Caitriona.”

  “Do you want to sleep with her?”

  “Do I want to sleep with Caitriona?”

  Minnie tilted her head to make sure she couldn’t hear Adam upstairs. No. But she lowered her voice even more.

  “You know what I mean…is Caitriona the kind of woman a man would have an affair with?” Minnie asked, knowing it was a ridiculous question. Anyone could obviously have an affair with anyone.

  “Are you wondering if I find her attractive?” Connor asked.

  “I guess…yeah.”

  “Are you wondering if I find her more attractive than you?” Connor asked.

  “What? No!”

  “Sure you are. You’re asking me whether or not…as a man…I’d want to trade you in for a woman like Caitriona and the answer is no,” he said.

  Minnie stared at the screen and watched Connor blink at her. He smiled, blinked. They were quiet together, connected by the electric-blued light.

  “You’re only saying that to make me feel better.”

  “I’m not,” Connor said, folding his arm behind his head, adjusting his phone.

  “I thought you were going to bed.”

  “I was! But then you started flirting with me so I got a second wind,” he said, laughing.

  “Connor! I was not! Go to bed,” she said.

  “No. You go to bed.”

&n
bsp; “Where’s Samantha?” Minnie asked after his wife.

  “Asleep.”

  “Where are the boys?” Minnie asked after his sons.

  “Asleep.”

  “Tonight Adam called us sexual troubadours.”

  “Wait, what? Called who sexual troubadours? You and me?” Connor sat up, laughed again. Connor was always laughing. It made Minnie laugh. She put her hand over her mouth before shushing him and turning her phone volume down.

  “He said we were more like a duet. He only said it because I was jealous of him kissing Caitriona…in the play.”

  “Aaand because they used to date.”

  “But never slept together,” Minnie mumbled.

  “But you never told him we slept together,” Connor said.

  Minnie’s toes twinkled.

  “That was a long time ago,” she said softly.

  “Right,” he said.

  * * *

  It happened one night after a wedding, traveling. The quartet was three hundred and fifty miles away. The women got one hotel room, Connor got another. The other two women had gotten drunk and fallen asleep. Minnie was sober, awake, went across the hall to Connor’s room.

  It was one of those nights Minnie was feeling lonely although she hadn’t been alone much in days. Ivy was always either sitting on her or underneath her or Minnie had been giving cello lessons to the middle schoolers she always gave them to, or she and Adam were either next to one another in bed or next to one another on the couch or next to one another in the kitchen. But Adam also had rehearsals, work, more rehearsals. He and Caitriona had just begun rehearsals for the play they were in now. The play that had a total of two cast members.

  Adam.

  Caitriona.

  Minnie truly believed Adam was in love with Caitriona even though he denied it and even though he was always good to Minnie. She couldn’t shake it, like she had an allergy to not believing it. And she didn’t want to talk to Connor about that, but she wanted to be close to someone. Adam was three hundred and fifty miles away at home with Ivy. Sometimes when Minnie played weddings they got a babysitter and Adam came with her, the two of them driving home together in the dark, her heels slipped off and cornered on the floor of the car next to her black, slick-footed stockings.

  She tapped on Connor’s door and he opened without asking who it was—the luxury and privilege of being a man.

  “Minnie Mouse! Fancy meeting you here. What’s up?” he said, his voice bright with alcohol.

  “I can’t sleep,” she said.

  “My room is your room,” he said, ushering her in. He closed the door behind them.

  Connor was handsome in a sneaky way. His teeth were a bit big and his mouth had to do some extra work to cover them. His eyes were unremarkable, the color of chili. He looked like a computer-generated version of a man. Something aliens would create to explain humans to one another. Something plain enough to get the point across, but nothing too special. That was the sneaky part. The more Minnie looked at him, the more time she spent with him, the more handsome he became. Like one of those magic pictures that revealed something even deeper, even more important, if you looked at it long enough and let your eyes go out of focus.

  “You’re a night owl too,” she said to him and meant for it to be a question, but it didn’t come out like one. It made her more insecure, the fact that she couldn’t even ask a proper question.

  “Sometimes. Samantha is the early bird,” he said. There was one bed in the room. Connor sat against the headboard, crossed his feet at the ankles. He was wearing his glasses and usually wore contacts. He was wearing a blue Cubs T-shirt, which made her think of Adam, except she was already thinking of Adam, so it felt like wearing a wet bathing suit in the rain.

  Minnie didn’t know where to sit. They were friends, had been friends for years. Close friends, even. But it wasn’t like she was used to being alone in hotel rooms with him. There was a chair and a desk. She pulled out the chair and sat there.

  “Is it creepy if I say you can sit on the bed?” Connor asked.

  “No. You’re not a creep. It would be creepy if you were a creep. Besides, I came over here. It’s not like you showed up at”—she looked at the clock, read the time aloud—“twelve forty-five in the morning at my hotel door claiming you couldn’t sleep. I’m the aggressor here.”

  “What are you aggressing, Wilhelmina?” Connor asked. He smiled. Connor smiled a lot.

  “You’re the only person in the whole world who calls me Wilhelmina. Not even my parents call me that.”

  “It’s a pretty great name.”

  Minnie shrugged, got on the bed beside him. He looked at her.

  Minnie was shocked at how easy it was to kiss Connor. One moment they were making jokes about some random commercial and the next, Minnie had her head on Connor’s shoulder. So when Connor turned his head to look at her and leaned forward, they were kissing. Almost like an accident.

  Once Connor was on top of her, there was a moment when he stopped kissing her, pulled away, took his glasses off and extended his arms so he was hovering over her.

  “Are you sure this is okay?” he asked. Her mouth tasted like his—the pepper-metal of vodka, the bright, starry bite of lime.

  “Are you sure this is okay?” she asked him.

  “Samantha and I have kind of an open relationship thing. She has a guy…a man…she sees him sometimes. I don’t ask too many questions,” he said.

  “Adam and I—” Minnie started, then stopped.

  “Yeah?”

  “This is okay,” she finished, nodding.

  Connor and Samantha’s open relationship thing meant Connor had condoms. Minnie tried not to think about the other women he did this with. How often? How many? One? Five? One hundred? He was a pharmacist and Minnie thought about that when he was inside of her. She pictured him in his white coat, the name tag. She’d seen him in it a couple times when she went to the drugstore where he worked.

  She opened her eyes and saw the pinched vertical line between his. I am having sex with Connor. I am having sex with the viola player. I am having sex with a pharmacist. I am having sex with a man who is not my husband. I am having sex with not-Adam. She wondered if Connor saw the periodic table when he came, if he thought about metals and gasses, if he anxiously double-checked his brain to make sure he hadn’t screwed up someone’s prescription. He made a dove-like sound when he finished—a quiet, gray coo. Minnie laughed after she came. Maniacally in a burst. Connor shook his head and laughed with her, gently pulling the hem of her shirt down for her as she put it back on. Connor went barefoot to the vending area and brought back one of every candy bar—sugary-chocolate sticks of peanuts and nougat and almond and coconut and milk chocolate, dark chocolate—and they ate them in bed together, watching a documentary about the Great Barrier Reef.

  “Everything is dying,” Minnie said as they watched the neon-green fingers of a sea anemone wiggle in the water. Glowing hot-purple, blue, and pink corals, crookedly stacked like dirty plates in a kitchen sink. She licked chocolate from her fingers and began to cry as the smack of a shock-yellow fish moved through the ocean. Connor pulled her close, touched the back of her neck and let his hand stay there.

  “You’re okay,” he said. He said it again, softer.

  Minnie snuck back into her room in the early morning hotel hallway light. No one knew what had happened but the two of them, not even Stella. And at breakfast, the only things Connor did to acknowledge it:

  maintain eye contact while he took his shoe and purposely tapped the top of hers as she sat across from him putting jalapeño cream cheese on her toasted bagel

  and

  put his hand on the small of her back as they left the hotel. A light touch, like a feather blowing by. The wind?

  Yes, it happened once. And sleeping with Connor was the worst thing she’d ever done. Couldn’t everyone see it? Didn’t the green-haze fug of it pulse from her skin?

  * * *

  Back in
her basement, with Connor’s face on her phone screen, Minnie considered these things and simply said again, “That was a long time ago.”

  “Well, about six weeks ago,” he corrected her. Frowned.

  “Let’s talk about something else. Like, how I wish I had a cup of tea.”

  “What kind?”

  “Rooibos and honeybush with a wedge of lemon and a smidge of sweetness.”

  “If you were here with me, I’d make you that cup of tea.”

  “Would you?” she asked.

  “You know I would,” Connor said.

  Minnie took a deep breath in, tried to keep herself from crying and said, “Okay, I’m going to bed.”

  “So am I,” he said.

  Neither of them budged.

  Neither of them looked away from their screens until Adam opened the basement door and Minnie jumped and ended the call.

  “Sorry I startled you,” Adam said, yawning.

  “I’m done down here,” she said.

  “Good. I fell asleep. I couldn’t even hear you.”

  “Go to bed. I’m coming up in a sec.”

  “Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  When Adam was gone, Minnie texted Connor.

  Sorry! It’s fine! I was just jumpy. Adam came down here. Thanks for practicing with me tonight. See you tmrw. X

  He responded quickly.

  No worries. Until tmrw. Goodnight, Minnie Mouse.

  Minnie went upstairs, scrolled through Adam’s phone. There were no texts from Caitriona. Minnie was disappointed and felt foolish for that disappointment, which made her feel even worse. She was a black cloud, a sunken ship. She washed her hands at the kitchen sink, stood there drying them, staring off at nothing.

  She got Caitriona’s number from Adam’s phone, beeped the digits into her own, and typed:

  I know you’re in love with Adam. I know it. And trust me, I get it.

  Minnie stared at those words, those letters, those symbols representing whatever they represented, in the language they both knew. She sent the text, then deleted it from her phone. She went to the bathroom, washed her face, flossed, brushed her teeth. She went into her purse and put that rose quartz on her nightstand. She didn’t believe in crystals, but she liked knowing it was there. She took off her clothes and got into bed with Adam. She’d tell him about Connor soon. And maybe he’d tell her the truth about Caitriona too. Soon enough. Maybe Adam knew about Connor already, the same way she already knew about Caitriona. Minnie fell asleep quickly, only to gasp awake with anxiety fifteen minutes later. Her heart, tap dancing. She arched her back and cooed like a dove, relieved when her husband reached over and moved her hair—his fingers, her nape, the lown dark.