Karen is so shocked she nearly cries out. The pain is instant and rude. A crush? A real intense crush?
“Oh yeah?” Tag says.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Bruce says. He’s drunk, Karen reminds herself. He hasn’t had this much to drink maybe ever. He is probably making up a story to impress Tag Winbury.
“She worked with me at Neiman Marcus,” Bruce says. “At first we were all business. In fact, I didn’t even like her that much. She was uppity. She came to my store from New York City, from Bergdorf Goodman, where she worked in shoes.”
Bergdorf’s. Shoes. Yes, Karen vaguely recalls someone… but who was it?
“Oh yeah?” Tag says again.
“Then we became friends. We’d take our dinner break together. She had a different perspective on the world and it was… I don’t know… refreshing, I guess, to talk to someone who had been places and done things. This was right after Celeste left for college, and I’m not going to lie, it was like a midlife crisis for both me and Karen. Karen hates to shop, hates to spend money on frivolous things, but she started going to all these trunk shows, Tupperware parties, something called the Pampered Chef. And I took on more night shifts so that I could be with this other woman.”
Karen feels her heart pop, like a tire sliced by a granite curb, like a balloon drifting into a thorny rosebush. There’s a concussion in her chest. She can’t believe she’s hearing this. Now, in her final days, she is learning that the man she has spent her whole life loving once harbored feelings for another woman.
Karen tries to calm herself. A crush is nothing. A crush is harmless. Hasn’t Karen herself had crushes on people—the young man who worked in the produce section of Wegman’s, for example? She used to give him a little wave and if he waved or smiled back she would float through the store, sometimes so giddy that she would buy treats she shouldn’t have—white chocolate Magnum bars, for example.
“Did you two ever…” Tag asks.
“No,” Bruce says. “I thought about it, though. It was a confusing time in my life. I can’t tell you how much it turned my whole world upside down. I had spent my entire life feeling like one person and then suddenly I felt like someone else.”
“Tell me about it,” Tag says. “What was her name?”
“Robin,” Tag says. “Robin Swain.”
Karen does gasp—loudly—but neither Tag nor Bruce hears her. They just puff away on their cigars. Karen feels her insides turn to liquid. She has to sit down. She frantically tries to arrange the drapes back as she found them and she clambers out from behind the sofa. She should go back to her room. She can’t have Bruce finding her here. If he knew she had been eavesdropping he would… vaporize.
Robin Swain. No. Please, God, no.
She can’t make it back up the stairs. She sits on the sofa but feels too exposed. She would slide down to the floor but she’ll never be able to get back up. She looks around the room in a wild panic. Suddenly, she hates the house, its luxurious furnishings, the ostensible kindness of the Winburys, which now seems like a masked cruelty. Why on earth would Tag ask Bruce such a heinous question?
Why would Bruce give such an answer?
Robin Swain.
What did Bruce mean by that?
But Karen knows what he meant. And that’s why she’s reacting this way. She knew there was something unusual about Bruce’s friendship with Robin. But of course it was inconceivable, unthinkable. It made no sense.
Karen steadies herself. Bruce is drunk, she thinks. He made up a story for Tag, out of machismo. He used Robin Swain’s name because it was the first that came to mind. Karen shouldn’t put any stock in what she just heard. She should go to bed. She manages to make her way back to the entry hall and climbs the stairs.
Once in her room, she takes an oxy. She takes two. Then she climbs into bed, still in her robe. She’s shivering.
An intense crush on Robin Swain. They shared dinners; Bruce worked nights so they could be together. A confusing time in his life. A midlife crisis.
Well, yes, Karen thinks. This is confusing.
Robin Swain is a man.
It was September, right after Celeste left for college. Karen and Bruce had rented a U-Haul and driven her all the way across Pennsylvania and nearly all the way across Ohio to Oxford, which was only five miles from the Indiana border. They had helped her move into her dorm room in Hahne Hall, they had met her roommate, Julia, and Julia’s parents. Karen and Bruce had attended the opening address by the college president and then they returned with Celeste to her room, both Bruce and Karen at loose ends, unsure of how to say good-bye. Eventually, Celeste decided to go to dinner at the Kona Bistro with Julia and her parents; she had left Karen and Bruce alone in her room. Karen had thought about simply moving in or renting an apartment down the street, and she’s sure Bruce did too.
Neither of them had said much on the drive home.
A week or two later, Bruce had come home talking about a new colleague, Robin Swain. He was a man about Bruce’s age who had transferred in from the shoe department of Bergdorf’s. Robin had grown up in Opelika, Alabama, and had started college at Auburn but hadn’t finished. He’d always wanted to go to New York City so he saved his money and bought a bus ticket. He was first hired at Bergdorf’s to work in the stockroom.
Initially, Bruce complained about Robin. He might have come from a small town, but working in Manhattan had given him an attitude. He disparaged the King of Prussia store, the mall, the entire Delaware Valley. It was nowhere near as sophisticated as New York City, he said. The area was permanently stuck in 1984, back when the Philadelphia sports teams were good and perms were in fashion and everyone listened to Springsteen. Robin himself listened to country music.
But over the course of a few weeks, Karen noted a shift. Bruce started to talk more favorably about Robin. One of the shirts that Bruce came home to model for Karen was something that Robin had picked out for him. Now that Karen thinks back, that was when Bruce’s sock fetish started. Robin loved flashy socks, and soon after, Bruce adopted the affectation; he wore rainbow socks, zebra socks, socks printed with the likeness of Elvis. He bought a CD called When the Sun Goes Down by Kenny Chesney and started singing the song all the damn time. Everything gets hotter when the sun goes down.
One night, Bruce invited Robin home for dinner. This had struck Karen as a bit strange. She and Bruce rarely had guests for dinner, and the town of Collegeville, where Robin was renting an apartment, was over an hour away. It was impractical. If Bruce wanted to have dinner with Robin, he should do so at the mall.
But Bruce had insisted. He had instructed Karen what to cook—her Betty Crocker pot roast with potatoes and carrots, a green salad (not iceberg lettuce, he said), and snowflake rolls. He would pick up wine on the way home, he said.
Wine? Karen had thought. They never, ever drank wine with dinner. They drank ice water, and Bruce, occasionally, a beer.
When Bruce and Robin walked in, they had been laughing at something, but they sobered up when they saw Karen. Robin was tall, wearing an expensive-looking blue blazer, a white shirt, navy pants, a brown leather belt with a silver H buckle. He wore light blue socks patterned with white clouds, which Bruce proudly showed off to Karen by lifting Robin’s pants at the knee. Robin had a receding hairline, brown eyes, a slight Southern drawl. Had Karen thought gay when she saw him? She can’t remember. Her overarching emotion at dinner was jealousy. Bruce and Robin talked between themselves—about the merchandise, about the clientele, about their co-workers. With each change of topic, Robin tried to include Karen, but maybe Karen’s responses were so frosty that he stopped trying. She hadn’t meant to be unkind to Robin but she had felt blindsided by his presence. Her mind kept returning to the sight of Bruce lifting Robin’s pant leg at the knee. The gesture had seemed so familiar, nearly intimate.
She had chalked up her conflicting emotions to the fact that Celeste had left and now it was just Karen and Bruce, and Bruce had gone out and found a friend at work. Which was fine. After all, Karen had friends at the Crayola factory gift shop. She was friends with nearly everyone! But there was no one special, no one she would invite home to dinner, no one she would talk to and laugh with and in so doing make Bruce feel irrelevant.
After dinner, Bruce had suggested Robin help him with the dishes so that Karen could put her feet up. When had Karen ever put her feet up? Never, that’s when. But she knew how to take a hint. She bade Robin good-bye and Bruce a good night and she had stormed upstairs to lie angrily on the bed and listen to the two men washing and drying the dishes and finishing the wine and then stepping out onto the back porch to talk about heaven knows what.
Karen feels the oxy gripping her by the shoulders, then there is a great release as the pain falls away.
Bruce had an intense crush on Robin. A man. It was a confusing time, he said. Suddenly I felt like someone else, he said.
To Karen, it’s a nuclear confession. Her husband, her state champion wrestler, her hungry wolf in bed had had feelings for another man, feelings he obviously isn’t comfortable acknowledging because to Tag, he changed Robin’s gender to female.
Robin worked at Neiman Marcus only through the holidays that year. By the time Celeste returned to Oxford after Christmas break, Robin had been transferred to the Neiman Marcus flagship store in Dallas. Had Bruce been upset? Heartbroken, even? If so, he’d hid it well.