22. Bonnie #2
His chair creaks. I wait. I will not give him another question to answer instead.
“About our arguments. What you said when I let her ride Mercy, and when you wanted the jacket back. What you said after the dinner. Sometimes we hadn’t even finished talking before I sent her a message about how angry you were.”
My cup is on the table. I put my hand around it and cannot lift it.
“Did you tell her I cried?”
“Yes.”
I had thought I was prepared for that. The room looks strangely sharp: a crumb beside the cup, the folded clinic schedule, a mark on the table I have meant to wipe away all evening.
He knew what I looked like when I cried. He knew how much I hated doing it in the middle of an argument, how I tried to get the words out before my throat closed. He had watched me struggle and taken the story to her.
“What did you say about it?”
“That I couldn’t talk to you without upsetting you. That everything I did made you angry.”
“Did you tell her why?”
“She knew about the campaign. She knew you wanted it stopped.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“No.” His voice is rough. “I made it sound like you were making me choose for no reason. Like I was trying to work and you kept finding something wrong with it.”
I get up. I go as far as Cricket’s bedroom door and stand there listening to her breathe.
“I asked you to talk to me,” I say. “And you went and told her how hard I was to talk to.”
“Yes.”
For a while that is all I can bear. He stays on the phone. I wish I could see his face, then am glad I cannot.
“Was she right about the calls after I left?”
“I called her. She called me. Most nights, for a while. You leaving. What I’d changed at home.
Why I thought you should come back. Then the tour, the next appearance.
Sometimes nothing much. What she’d eaten.
A horse she’d ridden.” He pauses. “She brought lunch. I let her stay. I liked having someone there who was pleased to see me.”
I picture her at my table. I have pictured it before, but now I know he was waiting for the company.
“Did you want her?”
He takes too long. My face burns.
“I liked looking at her,” he says. “I liked that she wanted me to. I let her straighten my clothes before the interview. I knew I wouldn’t stand there letting her do it if you walked in.”
I close my eyes.
“Did you kiss her?”
“The kiss on my cheek at the presentation. You saw it. There wasn’t another one. We didn’t sleep together.”
I am relieved. I hate that I have to be relieved about something this small inside everything else he is telling me.
“Did you want to leave me for her?”
“No.” That answer comes immediately. “I wanted you home. I wanted you to stop objecting to her.”
“While you kept calling her.”
“Yes.”
I return to the table. My chair scrapes loudly across the floor, and I freeze until I am certain Cricket has not woken.
“She told me I was good enough when you were poor,” I say. “That you needed somebody who fit the man you are now. I told you she said it, Gage.”
“You did.”
“Did you believe me?”
Silence. I put the phone on the table and switch it to speaker because I cannot keep holding it.
“Answer me.”
“I thought she might have said it. I told myself you’d taken it the wrong way.”
“What right way was there?”
“There wasn’t one.”
“She wanted to be your wife.”
“I knew she wanted more than the work. I kept telling myself I hadn’t offered her anything because I said I was married.”
“You told me to apologize.”
“I know.”
“You knew it could be true, and you wanted me to tell her I was sorry.”
“I wanted the dinner to go well. I wanted you to stop saying it where I’d have to do something about it.” His breath catches. “I wanted you to give way because I thought you would. You were my wife.”
I stare at the phone.
“That was supposed to mean you would believe me.”
“Yes.”
I have to get up again. I take a clean dishcloth out of the drawer and press it to my face. I cannot find the tissues and will not spend another minute looking for them while he waits to hear whether I am crying.
“Did you ever tell her you wanted her in my place?”
“I never said I was going to leave you or marry her. I talked about next season as though her place beside me was settled. When she spoke as if she understood me better than you did, I let her.”
“Because you liked it.”
“Yes. I liked it.”
The admission is quiet. It hurts more than if he had shouted. I cannot argue him into meaning something better.
“What we do in bed stayed between us. What we did, what you like. She never got a photograph of you off my phone, either.” He stops. “But I talked about the marriage like I was the one trying to save it and you were the one making it impossible.”
I sit down with the dishcloth in my lap. It is the answer I asked for. I will think of another question tomorrow, probably, and hate having to ask it. Tonight I have enough to understand what he made with her.
“If I remember something else I need to know, you don’t get to say we’ve already done this.”
“I’ll answer.”
I look at the schedule. My name, by itself, above the description of a class I know how to teach.
“Did you think she belonged beside you more than I did?”
“No.”
“I was pregnant. I was tired. I couldn’t stand through a whole dinner and laugh at everything. She could.”
“She laughed because I was giving her what she wanted. You were asking me to stop.”
“That doesn’t answer whether you wanted me.”
His voice changes. “I wanted you, Bon. I still do.”
“You hardly looked at me.”
“I looked. Then you’d ask me about the tour, or tell me you weren’t lending Mercy, and I’d get angry.”
“So wanting me didn’t matter very much.”
“I acted like I could come back for you when I’d finished doing what I wanted.”
I remember sitting across our kitchen table from him in May, his thumb moving over my knuckles, waiting for him to say he remembered what we had agreed. Then Tawny’s name lit the screen between us.
“I needed you while it was happening,” I say.
“I know.”
“I was your wife when you didn’t have the Byers dinners or people wanting a photograph. I didn’t stop being your wife when you got them.”
“No. You didn’t.”
I hear him take a breath that shakes at the end.
“I loved you before I had any of that. I loved you in May. I know how that sounds after what I’ve just told you.”
“It sounds like it didn’t help me.”
“It didn’t.”
He does not ask me to say it back. I am grateful and furious that I can still be grateful for so little.
“At the presentation, when I had the microphone,” I say. “You were embarrassed by me.”
“Yes.”
I swallow. He continues before I can end the call.
“People were looking at me. You were saying what I’d done where they could hear. I wanted you to stop.”
“I’ve thought I should have waited until we were alone. Kept my voice down. Wiped my face before I climbed those steps. I actually thought about the dust.”
“Bonnie, I was the one who put you below the camera. You’d already asked me privately.”
I look toward the bedroom. I can still hear Cricket breathing.
“And then you let them keep saying I’d chosen it.”
“I let them say it after July too. I’d ended the campaign. I wanted credit for that without having to stand up and tell everybody why it had to end.”
“Until September.”