Alternative Lives

Just like in a movie, she thinks. The movie of our lives. Sally doesn't smoke or drink except when she's with Jack. It's part of our relationship. It symbolizes something.

Sally believes symbols are a code unraveling the secrets of the unseen world. The first time she and Jack met, he was wearing a red tie and she a red dress. She wasn't sure she liked him, but she knew the significance of red: the color of blood, of power and passion-and warning and danger. If anyone finds out what we're doing in Room 209 of the Camelot Motor Court every Tuesday and Friday afternoon, Sally thinks, we'll lose everything.

"I'm totally different when I'm with you," she says to Jack.

"'Nanimal."

She looks puzzled.

"'Nanimal. You're an animal, baby." He extricates himself from the sheets and walks naked to the bathroom. She studies him, awed at the ease with which he inhabits his middle-aged body.

Teddy would never do that. He'd make love fully dressed if I let him.

Sally stares at her French-manicured hands. There's a noticeable indentation on the third finger of the left one. She always takes off her wedding ring when she and Jack are together.

It's a ritual, performed exactly the same way every time. First, the Manolo shoes with the silly decorations Jack always makes fun of. Then the earrings, deposited in her blazer pocket. The silk shirt and skirt, draped on a chair. Finally, the platinum band with a large diamond solitaire, like the unblinking eye of an omnipresent and judgmental God, is relegated to her purse.

She remembers their first time in this motel room, almost a year ago. She'd tried to camouflage her nervousness with the unaccustomed shellac of sexual bravado, casually peeling off her attire without preamble. It had evoked an uncouth bray from the smooth-talking and persuasive man who'd called her office that morning and said to her, "We've only met once, but I feel like I've known you forever. Do you believe in destiny? I do…"

Disconcerted at his laugh, she'd reflexively covered herself, then realized how ridiculous she must look-a middle-aged woman behaving like an uneasy virgin or an embarrassed Eve in a sleazy Eden after meeting the serpent.

"Well, you don't waste any time," Jack had remarked. "You slip out of your marriage as easily as your clothes. How convenient."

Today, the recalled comment makes Sally blush. You're my first fall from grace, she wants to tell Jack, as he rejoins her in bed. I wouldn't be here if I didn't care for you.

"You bring out something in me no one else has," she blurts, and immediately regrets it. The triteness of the sentiment hangs in the air like passed gas. "Really," she says. "I mean it. You're-this-is special."

"Yeah," Jack murmurs, plucking the cigarette from her fingers and squashing it in the ashtray. "Damn right about that."

***

After sex, Sally and Jack play What If. She's started the game because Jack's conversation week after week in Room 209 consists mainly of instructions-faster, slower, wider, harder, turn around, move a little higher, do it again.

What If's almost better than making love, she thinks, as they lie naked, trying on alternative lives like ready-to-wear off the rack.

"What if," Sally says, "we'd met in college."

"Huh?" Jack mumbles.

"What if we'd met in college?"

"Were you smart?"

"I had a four-year academic scholarship." In reality, she'd worked to pay the tuition at a second-rate junior college, gotten an associate degree in business and married the first man who proposed to her-things she wouldn't dream of telling Jack.

"I'd have made you write my term papers."

"I'm serious, Jack."

"Me, too." He sighs. "Okay. I would have run into you in the library, though I sure as hell didn't spend much time there." He reaches over to the nightstand, drains the plastic cup of vodka, and pours more. "You must have looked just like Ali McGraw in Love Story, right? I wasn't your type, but you couldn't resist me. You'd wear nothing under your preppy plaid miniskirt and we'd fuck standing up in the sociology aisle."

He's warming up to this now. "We fucked on the counter in the chem lab. In a phone booth. Under the bleachers in the stadium. In the snow-you got frostbite on your butt and chilblains on your cunt and considered it well worth it."

"Jack!"

"Remember when you took me home to meet your parents? Dear old Daddy-pooh loathed me-said I was common, crude. He was right-I was, and you loved it. We fucked in their fancy Jacuzzi. In the coat closet with Mummy's mink. In your virginal single bed while your tight-assed, self-satisfied parents slept the sleep of the insufferably rich across the hall."

She likes his version of her life much more than the real one. Her father had left before she was born and she'd grown up in a trailer with her mother, a waitress who bought all their clothes in a thrift shop. Doughy and riddled with self-doubt, she'd trudged through a desolate and mostly dateless youth.

"What happened to us, Jack?"

"Hmm?"

"After college. What happened to us?"

"We got married, of course."

"And?"

"It isn't you I'm with in this room now."

***

Jack and Sally had met at a cocktail party. When she introduced herself, Jack had cackled. "Sally?" he said, in mock disbelief. "Don't tell me your middle name is Ann."

She nodded, self-conscious about being a career woman of forty cursed with a cute name.

"Well," he said. "I'm finally up close and personal with a real live Sally Ann." She wasn't sure whether he was handsome or not, but he acted as if he were, and it was a convincing performance.

He squinted at her, sizing her up. "Let's see-you were the most popular girl in school. Everybody adored you. You were a cheerleader. I watched you shake your pom-poms and had wet dreams about you every night. You never had a zit or a bad hair day. You loved the Monkees-'Daydream Believer' was your favorite song. You were the fucking Homecoming Queen, for Christ's sake, and all I wanted was for you to smile at me. But girls like you never noticed guys like me." He raised an accusatory eyebrow at her. "Did you?" he demanded.

She didn't like his tone of voice. "You've got the wrong Sally Ann," she started to say, "because this one could have been voted The Least Likely To Get Laid in the yearbook," but he continued talking before she could speak.

"You were Miss Perfect. You ironed your jeans, and wore sweater sets and pearls-"

Sally decided he was definitely obnoxious and probably drunk, and drifted in the direction of the buffet table.

"-and collected stuffed animals. You still have them, Sally Ann," Jack concluded in a loud voice to her retreating form. "In a box in your closet."

She turned back and stared at him.

"Aha!" Jack crowed. "I'm right about everything I said. I can tell by your expression." He plucked the glass from her hand. "Will the princess give a frog a smile and permission to buy her a drink?"

You buy people drinks at a bar, not a party, she thought, and smiled in spite of herself as she glanced around the crowded living room for Teddy. I told him I didn't want to go to this stupid thing.

"I've got a spouse here, too. And our other halves are probably saying the same things to people they just met." He eyed the clear liquid in her cocktail glass. "Vodka? Let me guess-Grey Goose. Right?"

"Of course," she replied, although she was actually drinking Perrier.

That a total stranger had intuited her secret stash of childhood teddy bears made her feel both uncomfortable and excited, as if she were spiritually naked and he was a psychic voyeur violating her soul with his all-seeing, ever-observant eyes.

***

Jack never speaks of his life. Sometimes, Sally wonders if he's deliberately drawing a line of intimacy she can't cross, but then tells herself he's being discreet-just like his insisting they rendezvous at an obscure motel rather than at one of the big hotels downtown, where the chances of bumping into someone they know are much greater.

Sally compensates for Jack's silence by talking about everything that pops in her head-her and Teddy's careers, their new house, the clothes she buys, her preferences in breakfast cereal and politics and perfume, her dinner menu that night. She feels compelled to tell him these things, to mark the territory of his mind with the minutiae of her life. It gives her intense pleasure to think that at seven tonight, he'll know she's eating linguine with clam sauce-white, not red, because Teddy hates tomatoes.

That's the sort of woman I am. Only with you, it's different. I do what Teddy likes out of duty. I'd do anything for you because- And here she stops, afraid to go any further.

All Sally knows about Jack's life is where he works and that his wife is Pat, a drop-dead-gorgeous blonde who drives a new champagne-colored luxury car. "Everything she has matches her hair," Jack once remarked. "Except me."

Jack has a wiry salt-and-pepper mane and a fabulous tan. Sally's hair is dead-leaf-brown but professionally streaked, and she's well-tanned now, too-all over, because Jack had remarked that tan lines turn him off. Three times a week, she goes to a tanning salon. Have to get those buns evenly done, she thinks, and feels a ripple of excitement at being able to shock herself.

***

In Room 209 this afternoon, Sally relishes the look of their well-cooked skins pressed together in the mirror that reflects everything they do on the California king bed. The sight of their tangled, perfectly matched bodies is enough to trigger an orgasm so intense that she does something she's never done before-scream.

Afterward, Jack remarks, "You come like a house afire. A woman after my own heart."

"I'd never even had an orgasm before the first time we made love," she wants to tell him, but he slips a cigarette between her lips before she can say anything.

***

Sally avoids having sex with Teddy. She stays up late, saying she's brought work from the office that needs her attention, or retires early and feigns sleep. Her husband says nothing except, "I'm sorry you're so busy," or "I'm sorry you're so tired," as if it were his fault.

This afternoon, though, when she gets home from the motel, Teddy is waiting for her. Before she can invent an excuse, he leads her upstairs to the bedroom and undresses her so carefully that it resembles an act of profound reverence.

She lies there, eyes squinched shut so she doesn't have to see his face, and imagines he is her lover. Suddenly, she loses control, and although she tries to stop it-I can't betray Jack-she has an orgasm. It's so different from the tepid twitches she's been faking for years that Teddy gasps, "Huh?" and immediately ejaculates, murmuring again and again, "I love you," into her damp hair. She frees herself and flees to the bathroom, where she turns on the faucet full force to cover the sound of her sobbing.

***

The next day, a dozen red roses arrive in Sally's office. She eagerly rips open the card. "You're always in my heart and mind," the message reads. It's signed, "Me." She stares, disappointed, at the prim penmanship as familiar as her own, and throws the card in the trash.

She suddenly realizes she doesn't know what Jack's handwriting looks like. The thought makes her feel small and hollow, like the cracked and compromised shell of a mollusk washed up unnoticed on a beach, its unfortunate occupant long ago consumed by something stronger than it.

***

The next time they're together, Sally asks, "What if our spouses found out about us?"

Lately, Teddy's been looking at her oddly, talking constantly about the sex they had the other afternoon-and Teddy never talks about sex. "You've-it's-never been like that before," he keeps saying. "You're a different woman than the one I married. You've-changed, somehow…" Sally is convinced that suspicion has a smell, like sweat, and swears its sour aroma exudes from her husband.

Jack shrugs and replies, "Pat's an in-your-face broad."

"She'd confront you if she suspected anything?"

"Confront? Hell, she'd come after me with the carving knife and I'd be singing soprano forevermore."

"Would she confront me?"

"She loves creating scenes."

"She'd tell my husband about us?"

"Misery loves company," Jack answers, matter-of-factly, "and my wife's an equal opportunity bitch."

Though Jack doesn't ask, Sally volunteers, "Teddy's the quiet type. I don't think he'd create a row-"

"Ha, those quiet types are the most dangerous. You know the headlines-'Jealous Husband Murders Wife and Self in Crime of Passion'-and everyone's shocked because he seemed like such a nice, sweet man." Jack yawns and stretches. "All I can say is, if Pat discovers our thing, you better get while the getting's good, before the fur starts to fly."

***

Sally scrutinizes Teddy closely now. It's like waiting for symptoms to appear in a person with a fatal disease.

Nothing seems right-his voice when he says goodbye, his expression when she comes home. At breakfast today, he talks agitatedly about some friend whose wife's having an affair. Several times lately, he's remarked how much he despises surprises. Tonight, when they dine in a Chinese restaurant, Teddy hands her the message from his fortune cookie: "Be prepared for an unexpected change in your circumstances."

"Now what do you think that means?" Teddy asks.

She shrugs and looks away. She knows it's a foretoken of what must come.

Sleepless at 3:00 A.M., she envisions horrible scenes-Teddy screaming. Teddy crying. Teddy breaking everything in the house and beating her until she's bleeding. Teddy flying into the first and last rage of his life, doing unimaginable and unspeakable things.

Sally knows her thoughts are irrational-Surely Teddy would never act like that-and tries to stop them, but she can't, any more than she can stop meeting Jack at the Camelot Motor Court twice a week.

***

"Jack." She leans on his chest, so he can't turn away for a cigarette or a drink. "What would we do if our spouses found out?" She talks about this constantly now, like a person picking at a scab and making it bleed again and again.

Jack shuts his eyes.

"Jack. I love you."

There's a long pause before he finally says, "Yeah. I got a thing for you, too."

"Jack, what will we do?" she persists.

"What do you think?" he replies, and kisses her.

Relieved, she wraps her arms and legs around him, and pulls the comforting anchor of his weight on top of her.

***

Late that afternoon, as she's cooking dinner, Sally glances out the window and notices a car in front of their house. It's a late-model Cadillac, its softly burnished metallic gold finish glinting in the sunset light. She squints at the driver, a striking blonde in a tawny-colored fur coat that matches her hair.

Sally steps away from the window. Oh God, it's Pat. I've got to call Jack. She looks at the clock. Teddy will be home any minute. She knows what she must do. She swiftly walks to the bedroom and grabs her suitcase from the closet. She's planned a hundred times what she'd take. You're not the only one who hates surprises, Teddy.

She's headed for the door when Teddy walks in. "Who's that woman out there?" he asks, hanging his coat in the hall closet. "She selling something?" He frowns when he notices the suitcase in Sally's hand. "What are you doing?"

"I'm leaving you."

Teddy looks like he's going to burst into tears. "I don't understand-"

Through the frosted glass panes of the front door, Sally sees the furry beige shape striding up the brick path. "I'm in love with another man."

"Please-I love you-" Teddy frantically grabs her sleeve. The gesture reminds Sally of a child clutching at his mother, and it infuriates her.

"But I don't love you!" she shouts. "I never loved you! I only married you because I was afraid nobody else would ask me. God! When I think how abjectly grateful to you I was, I want to throw up." The doorbell rings. Sally yanks her arm from Teddy's grasp. "You said I was different. Well, I am. I'm not the pathetic loser you married-"

"What are you saying? You've never been a-"

Sally's talking fast now. "My whole life, I've settled for less, thinking it's all someone like me could get. Now I know I can have anything I want." She opens the front door. The blonde woman starts to speak. "Don't bother, Pat," Sally says, pushing past her. "I'm out of here."

As she walks down the path, Sally hears the woman say, "Sorry for bothering you, sir. My car's not working and I don't have my cell phone. Could you call a tow truck for me?"

***

In Room 209, Sally sits on the bed with her cell phone and the scrap of paper she's carried around for weeks, just in case she needed it. Somehow, she'd always known she would. Her hand shakes as she taps out the number.

"Hello?"

"Jack. Something's happened-it was a mistake but not a mistake-it's fate intervening to bring us together. I know I'm not making much sense, but I've left Teddy-"

"You've what? You're out of your fucking mind-"

A woman is talking in the background. "It's the new girl I hired, honey," Jack is saying to her. "Dumb cunt should be typing the notes for tomorrow's meeting."

"I'm in our room. Tell Pat to go to hell, pack a bag and meet me here-"

"And just why exactly would I want to do something that incredibly stupid?"

"Darling, remember when you said you believed in destiny-well, so do I. We were meant to be together-just look at how things have turned out-"

Jack isn't listening. "Pat baby, what can I do? The bimbo's screwed everything up. I'll be off in a minute and fix us a drink."

Sally clutches the phone so hard her hand hurts. "Jack! You told me if our spouses found out-"

"I didn't tell you a goddamn thing. It's your problem, not mine. You fucked it up, you fix it."

"Jack!" she screams. "How can you-"

"Your services," he says, each word as weighty as a blow, "are no longer needed," and hangs up.

The room reeks of cigarette smoke and mold and disinfectants sprayed to allay the slow decay of shabby linens and dirty shag. Sally rests a hand on the bedspread, then jerks it back as she imagines all the men and women who've spent clandestine hours here, like she and Jack, letting their bodily fluids ooze into the sleazy chenille. "Bastard," she mutters, as she puts on her coat, pockets the paper with Jack's address on it and heads out into the night. It's time to begin her alternative life with the final game of What If.

Biography

Phoebe Kate Foster is an associate editor for PopMatters, an online journal of global culture, and assistant editor for The Dead Mule, a Southern literary ezine. She has two collections of short stories currently being considered by literary agencies, and she is working on a novel.
Her short fiction has been nominated for the 2004 Pushcart Prize, is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner and Carve, currently online at Paumanok Review, Spillway Review, Word Riot and Wilmington Blues, and has appeared recently in Slow Trains (Fall '03, Winter '02), Vestal Review, Fiction Warehouse, Megaera (Fall '03, Winter '02), Flashquake, Eclectica (Vol. 7 #3, Vol. 5 #1) and Mid-South Review, as well as in issues #12 and #14 of Electric Acorn.