2. Loves Her Not
LOVES HER NOT
FOX
Igot the name Fox because I got lost.
The hunting lodge in the forest was in the style of an English country estate—rough stone, heavy beams, enormous fireplaces, and a long room where fifteen men could eat, drink, and tell lies—along with a spotless shed behind it outfitted with steel hooks, drains, and everything required to process the carcass of a deer or two.
My father, my uncle Reeves, David—who was twelve and already insufferable about it—and me: small, distracted, more interested in the way the light moved through the tree line than in anything that required a firearm.
I wandered off.
That part I remember clearly—not getting lost, but the moment before getting lost.
I saw something move in the undergrowth and followed it the way seven-year-olds follow things—without calculation, without telling anyone, without the basic self-preservation instinct that parents hope children have by that age.
I walked for what felt like a long time.
The sounds of the men receded.
The woods thickened.
I wasn’t afraid, which I think alarmed my father more than anything else, when they found me three hours later.
Who they found me with was a family of red foxes.
I had, apparently, sat down in a clearing and stayed still long enough that a vixen and her two kits came close enough to investigate.
Cross-legged in the leaves, not moving, I watched them the way I would anything that interested me—completely, quietly, and with my whole attention. They watched me in the same way.
The search party crashed through the undergrowth, at which point the foxes disappeared, though not before everyone saw them.
My father grabbed my arm hard enough to leave marks and scolded me from here until the cows came home.
Uncle Reeves, who was and remains an alcoholic with an arsenal of weapons—talk about a bad combination—laughed until he had to lean on a tree.
“Found him with foxes,” Uncle Reeves told everyone at Thanksgiving that year. “Just sitting there like he belonged to them.”
The name stuck.
Bennett men acquire their names like they do their land—someone decides, and then it simply is.
I didn’t mind it.
Fox suits me better than Archibald ever did, which was my grandfather’s name—may he rest in peace—which is the only reason I have it.
Grandpa believed that legacy was the highest form of love—that giving a child your name, your blood, your history—was worth more than affection, which, according to him, was both imprecise and unreliable.
“Fox?”
I look at Percy as he draws me back from my meandering thoughts.
I have taken to ruminating about the meaning of life—my life, to be more precise—these past few months, and Percy, who knows me better sometimes than I know myself, is aware of the reason and not happy about the direction I intend to take.
Percy and I co-own an event management company, which we started right after we graduated from university.
“What?” I ask patiently.
He shakes his head. “You know what?”
We’ve been friends forever, which means he has seen most versions of me, has formed opinions about all of them, and is not particularly shy about sharing them, which is either his most valuable quality or his most exhausting one, depending on the day.
“Can we not discuss this?”
I know that’s a failing battle because when Percy Hale is involved—he arrives early, stays late, and treats certain conversations like they might become important later, which they do. This is one of them.
“No.” He leans back in his chair, watching me the way he watches everything—like he’s cataloguing it, filing it away. Percy is the only person I know who takes handwritten notes in the margins of his own memories.
“She came by my place last week.” He steeples his hands. “Because you told her I wasn’t well.”
I rub a hand over my face. He’s talking about my wife, again. He has been doing that a lot since I told him I believed we were headed for a divorce.
“I know.”
“She brought me soup. The one she makes at Dina’s. The one I like. Leeks and potatoes.”
My molars grind together. “Percy.”
“I’m just noting—”
“I know what you’re noting.”
I turn toward the window.
We’re on the fourteenth floor, facing west, and on a clear day like today, you can see the river and the stadium and the low sprawl of the city, going soft in the afternoon light.
Nashville is beautiful in a way it hasn’t always been—it reinvented itself while nobody was looking, shed its skin somewhere around 2010, and grew something shinier underneath.
“I’m just saying she made an effort,” Percy continues. “She makes a lot of effort.”
I tuck my hands in the pockets of my pants and keep my back to him. “She does.”
“And you—”
“I know,” I repeat through gritted teeth. “I know how it looks.”
Percy genuinely likes Lucy, has from the beginning, from that first night at Dina’s when I called him at five in the morning and told him I’d met someone, and he asked what kind of someone, and I said the real kind, which was both the truest and the most useless thing I’d ever said.
I was drunk…on her, or maybe she put something in that cassoulet she served me.
Later, I told him it was just casual. I mean, she’s a cook at a small-time diner that pretends to be French—even though Dina is from Iran and Lucy was born and raised in Nashville.
When she got pregnant, I decided to do the right thing, and Percy told me he was proud of me and came to the courthouse wedding.
He gave a toast at the dinner.
Throughout our twenty-one-month marriage, my oldest friend has been the most consistent advocate for my wife.
“You’re making a mistake,” he warns.
I blow out a breath and shrug.
Percy thinks divorcing Lucy is a mistake.
I don’t.
Love matters to me in a marriage. I’ve never wanted what my parents had—a deal dressed up as a union. The irony, then, is that I didn’t do much better. I married a woman because she was pregnant with my child.
There’s nothing wrong with our marriage.
Sure, my family doesn’t like Lucy, and she can’t stand them.
No big deal.
I can’t stand them either.
She doesn’t fit into my world of old Tennessee money—but that’s just snobbery, and I don’t give a shit about it.
The sex is good—great even. We even have fun when we do get to spend time together. She’s easy to be with, comfortable. Her affection is warm, and she cares for me. I suspect she loves me.
But I’m not in love with her.
Not the way I was with Reina—who was my first and only serious girlfriend.
Reina comes from another old Tennessee money family. We were called “John Junior and CBK of Nashville” when we got together.
The relationship lasted four years.
It ended slowly and painfully.
We both made plenty of mistakes. We got busy with our lives and careers. She is a high-profile country music executive. I run an event management company.
Then there was the fact that the media was relentlessly talking about her closeness to one of the artists signed to the label she worked for.
I should’ve paid attention to that, but I trusted Reina.
That went up in smoke in the way of a country music song—on the lines she left me for another man—when I found the now-has-been country singer (I made sure of that) balls deep inside her in her hotel room in Memphis, where I’d come to propose to her.
It was going to be a surprise.
And, man, were we both surprised!
I want to be clear; I don’t have any such current feeling for Reina now. But it was after I had lunch with her—it was business—that I was reminded of how I used to feel about her, how much I loved her, and how that’s not what I feel for my wife.
The thought came to me then that I needed to end our marriage before we hit the two-year mark.
It was time to end the charade.
But it’s not an easy thing to do because Percy is right, Lucy is good people. Not just that. She’s kind, sweet, and generous. She’s the type of woman who takes soup to someone’s place because they’re not feeling well.
“Fox, what you’re thinking you had with Reina…that wasn’t love.”
I cock an eyebrow.
He sends me a flat, unimpressed stare. “It was fire, but it wasn’t…healthy. What you both had was fucking toxic.”
Reina and I had passion—loud fights, angry make-up sex. I missed her when she wasn’t around, and she missed me…well, she did until she started sleeping with that ex-singer cowboy who was now back where he belonged on a ranch in Texas hauling horse manure.
“It’s flat with Lucy.”
“Flat is not a bad thing,” he tells me. “Turbulence is not all that it’s cracked up to be, so—”
“And how the fuck would you know?” I cut him off.
Percy doesn’t do relationships, so it’s rich of him to talk about mine.
I look past the window again, at the city, at the dogwoods in the plaza below doing their annual, indifferent blooming.
I think about how to say the thing I’ve not been saying for almost two years, how to take it out of the place where I keep the things that are too precise to be comfortable and put it into words without it becoming something I can’t put back.
“I don’t love her. I don’t think I ever have.”
Percy shakes his head. “She’s good people, Fox.”
“I’m not saying she isn’t. I know she is.”
“So then what—“
“Percy.” I pause to take a deep breath as I reveal the ugly inside of me. “I don’t love her. I don’t think I ever have. I married her because I’d gotten her pregnant, and that was the right thing to do.”
The right thing.
My father’s phrase—his highest category of action, the thing the Bennett men do instead of the thing they want to do, because want is considered a private matter and right is considered a public one.
May he rest in peace.
“And then after she lost it, I couldn’t exactly—” I stop because it’s hard to say the next words, because I know I have wronged my sweet wife. “I stayed out of guilt. That’s the honest answer.”
Percy doesn’t say anything for a moment. He has the good sense, occasionally, to understand when silence is more useful than words.
“That’s a hard thing to say out loud,” he says finally.
“Yes.”
“Does she know?”
“No.”