So Long at the Fair: A Novel - Hardcover

Chapter One

Over, over, done and over. Finished. Jon Kepilkowski scratched his scalp with his fingernails. He'd shampooed, rinsed, and repeated, scrubbed under his arms and between his toes, soaped every surface, brushed under his nails, squirted into his ears. The water gushing from the showerhead was cooling. Reluctantly, he twisted the tap shut and worked himself over roughly with a towel.
From the bedroom window he watched his wife as she knelt in the dirt, her face obscured by her hat, her hands busy beneath a clump of pink flowers he couldn't name. He'd known her for twenty years, longer even if you counted the first two years of high school when it wasn't so much that he'd been afraid to say "Hello" to her, but more that she'd been so far out of his league that it hadn't occurred to him that opening his mouth and emitting speech in her direction was even an option. He'd not, he recalled, even uttered "Excuse me" the time he'd accidentally bumped her with his lunch tray, the contact between the orange plastic and the green wool of her sweater so intimate, so electric it had instantly closed his throat and jump-started his heart. He'd pretended at the time, he confessed years later, though she had no memory of the incident, that he'd not even noticed the collision had occurred. When she turned with a slight, involuntary gasp to see who'd jabbed her in the ribs, he'd turned in the same direction, as if obliviously searching the line behind him for a friend.
This morning she'd have been up for hours already, taking advantage of the early coolness. He wished he could see her expression under the brim of the hat. As always in these past few months, whenever he'd been apart from her for a few hours, anxiety began to collect around the edges of his consciousness. Between the moment the night before when she'd shoved her book onto the nightstand, maneuvering it among the detritus--the glasses of dusty water, the uncapped tube of ChapStick, the broken earring, the hair clip, the crumpled Kleenex--between that moment and this, had she found him out? What face would she show him when she looked his way?
Impulsively, he twisted the latch and slid the window up with a little too much vigor. The sash banged against the frame. "Gin!"
She turned, tilting her head back, squinting up at him with her hooded eyes, then drew back suddenly, feigning shock. "Hey! There's a naked man in my house! Get out, naked man! Get away from my window!" She kept her voice low, for him, alone.
He sighed, safe. "Maybe you'd like to come up?"
She laughed and turned back to the pink flowers.
He hadn't meant it as a joke. His relief had triggered desire, and he was vaguely, if, he acknowledged, unreasonably, irritated by her response.
He dressed in long shorts and a white T-shirt and Velcroed on the sort of shoes useful for splashing across shallow rivers. Since he'd started working at the agency, he'd decided that the button-down shirts and khakis he'd favored at the start of his career made him look like a little boy playing dress up and had abandoned that costume for one less earnest, one definitely but not too aggressively cool, as much to remind himself of who he was, or was trying to be, as to signal this to others. It wasn't a dull style, but nor was it, he recognized with some disappointment, the least surprising. He'd let his hair grow and curl midway down his neck, wore the jeans the world liked to see on an art director and, on summer workdays, European sandals that would have made his father sneer.
He retrieved the laptop he'd pushed under the bed the night before. One message from Kyle, his brother. Seven work-related messages, beginning with one from Kaiser, sent at four a.m., just before that lunatic had gone to bed, no doubt. Three from Freddi. He felt his pulse quicken. Better to have left the machine cold. Even now it was not too late to let it sleep, snap the cover down, slide the thing into its case ready to transport into work on Monday.
He carried it into the second bedroom, which functioned as his office, and gently shut the door. He fingered the Return key for a few seconds, savoring the anticipation. The first from Freddi was some copy ideas for Ballast Bank, some serious, some silly; none, he saw immediately, workable. The second read: "I hate weekends." The third: "I can almost sense you here beside me on the bed, your warm largeness, your flipper-like feet, your brown-sugar eyes. You are the bittersweet chocolate to which I press my tongue. I send you kisses for your lips and elsewhere. Good night."
He closed his eyes, allowed himself to swell with the thought of her. She resembled a fox, with her pale brown eyes that tended to amber; her small, very white teeth; her smooth, reddish hair; her tight, muscular body. He found the whole combination of sharpness and softness immensely attractive. But it was the way she looked at him that pushed him over the edge; her gaze told him that the two of them were the only ones in on it, whatever it was, the joke, the plan, the skinny. She had chosen him and he'd basked in it, rolled in it, lapped it up. She was like sugar, like nicotine; the more he got, the more he wanted. No, it wasn't over, done, finished. He craved her.
"My lips miss you," he typed, and then paused. "Elsewhere misses you, too." He paused again, absently pulling one of the antique fountain pens from the jarful he kept on his desk. He played with it, capping and uncapping it, rolling its smooth Bakelite case between his fingers. He couldn't think without something in his hands. And then, too, he always felt a little self-conscious writing to her. Words were her thing, not his.
"A kiss on your heart," he typed, inspired, "and one lower down, much lower." It was a line Napoleon had used in a letter to Josephine. He'd heard it on a PBS documentary last night. "You are so . . ." he began.
"Hey."
Ginny, long-legged and stealthy, despite her large bones, stood in the doorway in her garden uniform, the sleeves of one of his discarded T-shirts rolled up to her shoulders, the elastic waistband of her shorts supplemented with a safety pin, her dark hair springing free from its noose.
His heart exploded--the blast of adrenaline actually pained him--and his hand trembled as he reached to close the window of his message. Easy. Not guiltily fast. Stupid to have closed the door and shut out the sound of her bare feet on the carpeted stairs.
"Hey, yourself."
The cover made a tiny metallic click as it kissed the keyboard.
"More orders from headquarters, huh?"
He knew it was a point of pride with her not to allow herself to be suspicious; she would not be one of those women who worried about holding on to her husband.
"Your mother said I'd better keep my eye on you," she'd said just last month, as they drove through the blackness after an evening at Kyle and Paula's. "Like you were some caged bird ready to fly the coop the moment I turned my back on the door." She'd looked out the window as she spoke, her head tipped back, as though she were searching the night sky for a bird that had indeed flown.
"My mother," he'd said, his tone implying a roll of the eyes.
He could sense that she had turned her face toward him, though he'd kept his own eyes firmly on the ever-receding tunnel of light on the highway ahead.
"Does she know something I don't?" she asked.
It occurred to him to confess. Not to the whole of his crime but to a small degree of it. He might say he was worried that Freddi was attracted to him. It would be like opening a valve just a fraction, not so much that it would all escape but enough to gradually relieve the pressure. It would mean the end, of course, of late nights "working," of long lunches during which he could honestly say, "I'm with Freddi," without fear of arousing suspicion. It would mean the end of it all. It was a safe way out. He turned and, while his heart throbbed hard enough to choke him, looked at her full-on for two entire seconds, enough time to kill them both, if something unexpected had appeared on the highway. But, finally, he faced forward again. "Of course not."
"I suppose people who've behaved badly themselves tend to be suspicious of everyone else."
"Probably." He wished he could close his eyes to block out the shame.
"Well," she said, smiling, "you'd better never force me to use my wiles."
He laughed. She had always been the most guileless person he'd ever known. It was one of the things he loved best about her.
A near miss, he'd thought at the time. And he had resolved all the way home that it was finished with Freddi, that he'd learned his lesson. He made love to his wife that night with a fierce exuberance released by a nearly clear conscience. The lying was over, he'd assured himself. He loved Ginny. The thought of losing her had filled him with a dark and breathless panic the whole night through.
But by Monday, a bright, cheerful, cloudless day, the panic had seemed far away, a small, irretrievable flutter in the distance. At work Freddi had leaned over him and laughed at something he'd said, and her skin had exuded a scent he wished he could breathe forever.
And now here he was, trapped in his study with the evidence under his fingers and Ginny's large frame blocking the door. How had he gotten ink on his hands? "Just gonna wash up quick, and then I'm ready." He stood up, raising his eyebrows at her expectantly.
"Ready?" She cocked her head, pushing a damp curl behind her ear. Her finger left a smudge along her cheek.
"To go to Summerfest." He frowned. "What we're doing today."
She clapped both hands on the top of her head and made the face he used laughingly to call "the Lucy." An expression he now thought of privately as "the fuckup."
"What?" He sounded impatient, but what...